The Weirdest Story Ever Told
by RCGumby
Summary: The ultimate fanfiction crossover, combining more TV shows and movies than your eyeballs can stand without falling out of your head! Rate and review.
1. Forward

**Foreword by the Author, or**  
><strong>Don't Say We Didn't Warn You<strong>

Before beginning this new story, I feel I should explain a few things about it. First, I wrote the original version of this story during my college days, just for my own personal laughs. For publishing online, it will first go through several extensive rewrites and revisions so that it will truly be as the tagline says, the ultimate fanfiction crossover. At least, that's how I hope it turns out. And these revisions may take a considerable amount of time, so I can't guarantee that chapters will be posted on a regular basis.  
>Normally, I wait until one of my stories is complete before I start publishing installments of it. Frankly, it bugs me whenever someone else starts publishing a story I start reading online or in comics, and abandons it halfway through for whatever reason, and I don't want to subject other people to that. In this one instance, however, I'm breaking my personal rule about that because this story is by far the longest one I've ever tried. It could be years before the whole thing is finished, and I don't want to wait that long before posting it.<br>Finally, and most importantly, this is a work of fanfiction - a very long work of fanfiction using a _boat load_ of characters created by an equally large boat load of other people. Although most of the main cast of characters in this work are in fact my own, I want it on record as always that I make absolutely no claims to any of the borrowed characters, situations, or so-called intellectual properties that are going to appear in this work. This work is no more than and no less than a free showcase of characters from TV shows, movies, and cartoons that I grew up with as a child or later learned to love as an adult. And I want to give thanks beforehand to all those who are responsible for these characters: the writers who created them, the actors and actresses who portrayed them, and the producers and directors who brought them to the screen, big or small. Specific credits will be given as characters are introduced in the story.

Sit back. Relax. Make sure your tablet is fully charged. You're about to read:

**The Weirdest Story Ever Told**

*This has been a transcribed announcement.*


	2. Introducing the Players

**Chapter 1**  
><strong>Introducing the Players, or<strong>  
><strong>Where the Weird Things Are<strong>

Our story opens on a winter's night in Poker Bluffs, New Jersey, a small town where the most exciting thing that ever happened was when the local coffee shop used a different jelly in their doughnuts. And since at the beginning of this story it was one o'clock in the morning, they weren't making any doughnuts at all, jelly or otherwise. The darkness was broken only by the stars and the few street lights the town had, all shining down on a fresh two-inch layer of snow that had fallen that afternoon. Poker Bluff's three grocery stores were devoid of activity, as was the court house, the inn, and the town hall, and most of the town's inhabitants were sound asleep. The only people awake were five night-owls watching the late movie, three insomniacs drowning themselves in warm milk and numbered sheep, and one unhappily married man who decided he had to buy a new couch as soon as possible.

Oh, and one lone figure lurking around inside the Gumby house on Third Street. The figure sneaked into the kitchen under cover of darkness with the stealth of a cat. With perfect precision and silence, it crept up to the refrigerator, opened it up, and pulled out a container of mustard, three different packages of lunch meat, two different packages of sliced cheese, two hard-boiled eggs, a tomato, a head of lettuce, some leftover pickle relish, and about half a dozen other assorted foodstuffs. The person closed the refrigerator and set his/her/its future midnight snack on the counter and built a sandwich that would make Dagwood Bumstead jealous and an antacid manufacturer filthy rich.

Totally engrossed in the work, the midnight snacker failed to notice that another figure was sneaking up from behind with a baseball bat poised to knock the first figure senseless. The second figure brought the weapon back to deliver an incapacitating blow, and in the process, knocked a plant off its hook and flung it into a sink full of dirty dishes. The shattering noise (and I mean that literally) alerted the first figure, who grabbed the second figure, tackled him/her/it to the floor, picked it up and flipped it head over heels and slammed it to the floor again, and then yanked it up again and gave it a headlock.

Struggling proved futile for the captured prowler, so instead it growled to the first figure, "You got seven nanoseconds to get off me, Ima!"

"Rupert!?" said his captor. "I thought you were a burglar or something! What are you doing out here with that bat?"

"Oh, I just thought I'd try out for the midnight baseball team What do you _think_ I'm doing out here!? I thought _you_ were a burglar! What're you doing here at this time of the night!?"

"I was working late, finishing up our annual budget figures, and I got hungry," Ima replied.

"For that you have to work late? The only revenue we have is from online sales and the deposits on all our soda bottles. We could work out our annual budget on an abacus!"

Ima finished work on her giant sandwich, responding, "Well, we haven t got an abacus, so I have to do them like other people do." She took a bite, and between chewing she added, "And according to the numbers, we all better drink more soda."

"Don't tell me sales figures are _still_ in the basement!"

"Rupert, sales figures have tunneled _under_ the basement and are trying to find a route to the center of the Earth."

"Now wait a minute!" Rupert exclaimed. "You told me just the other day that sales of 'The Maltese Slipper' were _double_ that of our previous movie!"

"Yes, they were," Ima conceded. "I talked your mother into buying a copy."

Rupert fell into a silent sulk, wondering for the eight thousandth time if his company was cursed. He started his web-based entertainment company, R. C. Gumby Productions, in his own two-bedroom house three days before the dot-com bubble burst, using the most advanced equipment his available funds could buy from the Salvation Army. He, Rupert C. Gumby, an ex-librarian with no formal theatrical training and even less business sense, was CEO, manager, director, and all-around totalitarian dictator of a team of semi-dedicated people, most of whom only signed on to humor the little weirdo. His team produced comedy and satirical scripts and video productions for the internet, plus a weekly talk show webcast that in principle was a showcase for all things and all peoples out-of-the ordinary in the world. In practice, they usually just ended up arguing with each other on webcam for an entire show.

The woman who made the sandwich and smeared her boss all over the floor was Ima Nutt, Rupert's production manager and assistant director. She had been with the company since its beginning, following an abrupt departure from her previous position on a TV station technical crew. One of her male co-workers made a pass at her, and instead of following through the standard procedures of reporting sexual harassment, she elected to empty an entire tube of crazy glue into the co-worker's hair, bend him backwards until his head was glued to his butt, tie his legs to a heavy crane cable, and try to use him to demolish a condemned skyscraper in downtown Trenton.

As Ima took some more bites from her one-handed four-course meal, a third figure entered the kitchen, half-asleep and half-annoyed. "I would think that even humans would take a break from arguing to sleep," said Myran.

His comment about the species of his co-workers wasn't as out of left field as it sounded. Myran might have looked as human as Rupert and Ima, but in reality he was a cultural observation agent from the Star Confederation, an interstellar civilization centuries ahead of Earth in technological development, and millennia ahead of R. C. Gumby Productions in technological development. His human appearance was merely a disguise created by an advanced matter reshaping process used by all Confederation observers in order to blend into pre-contact societies. His actual physical form was more like a seven-foot-long slug with six tentacles. He once showed them an image of his original body, and after two other employees expressed sudden cravings for sushi, it was agreed not to speak of it again.

"Myran, what are you doing up?" asked Rupert.

Myran held up the object in his hand. It appeared to be a typical flip-open cell phone, but just like his own body, that was merely a disguise for something unearthly. "I was busy working on my communicorder. I've figured out away to increase its range 5%, and all it requires is a slight adjustment on the microtranstator configuration to allow it to increase its power output, thus lengthening the range of its scanner and communicator modes . . ."

What followed was either an explanation of the procedure or a scientific lecture which no human could begin to understand, so I won't even bother to quote it. Suffice to say this "communicorder" of his was a scanning and recording device and a long-range communicator all in one. Rupert and Ima just stood there, staring blankly at Myran for three minutes, wondering when he was going to say something intelligible.

"Uh, Myran," Ima broke in, "that's very . . . interesting, but it's getting late. I ought to be heading home."

Rupert turned to her. "Especially since you gotta be here early tomorrow. After we record the webcast, we've got the interviews to do."

"Oh right," said Ima, "the sound engineer's position. Finally, a full-time replacement!"

"Fingers crossed," Rupert replied. "And then! I've got a new idea for a movie: We're going to parody 'A Christmas Carol'!"

"Which one?" asked Myran.

Rupert and Ima were both taken aback. "Which one what?" asked Rupert.

"Which Christmas carol do you want to parody?"

Ima was first to get it. "Not a _song_, Myran! The Charles Dickens novel _titled_ 'A Christmas Carol'!"

"You've been here how many years? Following in the footsteps of how many previous observers? And you've never heard of 'A Christmas Carol'!?" demanded Rupert.

"'A Christmas Carol,'" repeated a completely different voice with no emotion whatsoever. Rupert, Ima, and Myran turned to the kitchen door as a tiny figure stepped through on two stubby legs. The figure looked for all the universe like a dark brown teddy bear with two tiny button eyes, a button nose, and no mouth. Yet with no visible mouth, the same flat voice continued from it, reciting, "Composed by author Charles Dickens of Portsmouth, England, Earth. First published by Chapman and Hall on the 19th of December, 1843, Earth-Gregorian calendar. The original novella was subtitled, 'Being a Ghost Story of Christmas', in that one of its major plot elements involved the manifestations of the so-called spirits of deceased humans in the presence of another human named Ebenezer Scrooge -"

"Myran, you oughta hire Chip out to Wikipedia," Rupert remarked. "He could revolutionize the Information Age."

"You oughta hire him out to the Mayo Clinic," Ima remarked. "He could cure insomnia for all time."

Myran walked over and picked up the ersatz teddy bear, which like Myran was merely a disguise. In reality, Chip was a sophisticated intelligent robot that Myran once built for a school science project. Many years later, when Myran was assigned to observe Earth's civilization, he brought Chip along as a mobile data recording and storage archive. Myran also downloaded into Chip all information on Earth available from previous planetary scans and cultural observers. But although Chip had proven many times to be a valuable partner in his mission, Myran now had mixed feelings about bringing him to Earth. Without the capacity for emotion, Chip could only process information on a purely logical basis. More than once, Chip's artificial brain nearly crashed while trying to process the goings-on at R. C. Gumby Productions and its highly illogical staff.

"Chip is just trying to help," Myran retorted as he picked the ersatz teddy bear off the floor. To Chip, he added, "I'd like to know why you're . . awake, so to speak. Shouldn't you be recharging?"

"My vibrational sensors detected movement in the kitchen of an unusually active level for this segment of Earth's diurnal cycle."

"That was me and Rupert," Ima deadpanned between sandwich bites, "fighting over the last slice of olive loaf."

Rupert gave her a puzzled look. "I don't have any olive loaf."

"Not anymore. I used it up in my sandwich."

"I _never_ had any olive loaf!"

Ima opened her half-eaten sandwich. "Then what's this?" she asked, indicating the lunch meat sandwiched between the Swiss cheese and lettuce, some of which she was still chewing.

Rupert took a close look at the pinkish slab of lunch meat dotted with bright green specks. "That's bologna."

Ima slowly stopped chewing. Her eyes slowly grew wide. Her face slowly turned as green as the specks on the bologna.

"I'm not hungry anymore," she said, somehow keeping her voice flat. "I think I'll go home and get some sleep." After a beat and a few steps toward the door, she added, "Or some Pepto." Another beat. "Or a stomach pump."

The next morning, just after six o'clock, R. C. Gumby Productions' bleary-eyed staff assembled at Rupert's house, including Ima, who seemed none the worse for wear after last night. She credited a very strong constitution, built up over many years by her mother's so-called cooking.

Rupert had spared no soda can deposits to renovate his house into a fully-functioning entertainment company, complete with video studio (in the attic), control room (spare bedroom), soundproof recording studio (spare bathroom), prop department (linen closet), the latest and most powerful computing technology available (Commodore 64), and a sophisticated climate-control system (ceiling fan). And all of it was about to be put to use good or bad, you decide to produce the latest episode of "It's a Weird World," the company's weekly webcast talk show and verbal slug fest.

In addition to director Rupert, assistant director and production manager Ima, and technical support specialists Myran and Chip, the production crew included a crack team of professionals, all top experts in their chosen fields, with the skills and creativity to make the highest-quality entertainment . . . . oh, who am I kidding? Let's just introduce the yo-yos:

Technical director Geraldine Atreck, known as Jerry to her co-workers and all her friends at Gold's Gym, was a 92-year-old widow of a former electronics store owner, and a five-time X-Games champion. Just one month earlier, she broke her own record time for the Mid-Atlantic off-road Harley Davidson motorcross. She had more energy than seventy people one-fourth her age, eagerly embracing such hobbies as kayaking, full-contact football, and tag-team wrestling, much to her great-grandkids' amazement and her co-workers' exhaustion.

Chief of publicity Gary Ingram Patrick "G. I. P." Funny was pursuing a radio and television degree at college when he unexpectedly dropped out at age 20. He forgot to mail his tuition payment. He was still unemployed when he joined R. C. Gumby Productions, and proved to be a loyal and enthusiastic staff member, always willing to help out when his co-workers needed it, and often when they didn't need it. Tall with light-brown hair, he had a wife named Jeanie (with the same color hair) and two young daughters. Gary and his wife were members of the local Polar Bear Club, a group with a tradition of swimming in freezing cold water every winter. Gary always told his co-workers it wasn't as crazy as it sounded, as long as you drink three quarts of hot coffee or cocoa just before going in.

Video and film editor Rhoda Dendron was originally from Portland, Maine, where she grew up an active community member. Her activities ranged from races between soapbox cars shaped like soda bottles, to strip-backgammon tournaments, to something involving a lampshade, two jars of centipedes, and a gallon of sheep's milk. Nobody ever got up the nerve to ask what that was about, fearing a detailed explanation would be ten times more demented. After struggling for acceptance in several areas of employment, including a brief stint working for her brother Phil in his flower shop, she eventually found a position in the psychiatric ward of Princeton Hospital. That position ended when the entire staff went insane, and that's when she was recruited by R. C. Gumby Productions, where her bizarre ideas and wild eccentricities fit in perfectly.

Perched on Rhoda's shoulder was her pet bird, Feathers. A rare species of South American parrot raised in Newark, Feathers had intellectual and vocal abilities on par with those of any normal human, and spared neither when commenting on how ridiculous she thought humans were. When Rhoda joined the company, Feathers volunteered her services as Rhoda's on-staff therapist, fearing R. C. Gumby Productions would suffer the same fate as Princeton Hospital without her rationalizing presence.

Ever since childhood, boom operator and key grip Abigail "Ab" Normal received scores of angry letters and emails for being personally responsible for perpetuating the old stereotype of the ditzy blonde. Her attention span was measured in milliseconds, and her mind wandered more haphazardly in more directions than a speck of dust caught in a tornado. In high school, she was voted most likely to forget her own name. Having recently moved to New Jersey from Boston, she failed to secure a number of potential jobs (including dishwasher, waitress, car wash attendant, etc.) before she gained her current position at R. C. Gumby Productions. Another very loyal and enthusiastic staff member, she lived to make everyone happy, but usually ended up driving them nuts.

Cameraman Homer Zelchel had his name legally changed at age 18, fearing he would never gain a serious job anywhere with a pun-sounding name like Robin Banks. If he'd only known... He was one of the original members of R. C. Gumby Productions, and always felt that his seniority entitled him to more privileges and higher rank. Fortunately, time and perspective gradually mellowed the bitterness and sarcasm that had threatened to consume him. That, and his co-workers threatened to turn him wrong-side-out if he didn't adjust his attitude.

Unably assisting the production crew was an equally incompetent support staff working hardly behind the scenes to ensure R. C. Gumby's rough operations, including Rupert's personal go-fer, copy boy, and all-around chief stooge, Fred Flintstone the 79,824th. Yes, you heard right, the latest descendant of the famous and still dopey Stone Age family. A recent high school graduate, Fred didn't want to go into the gravel mining business like his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather, or his great-great-grandfather, or his great-great-great-grandfather, or . . . you get the idea. He decided to go into entertainment, but instead he ended up at R. C. Gumby Productions. Overly grateful for the opportunity, portly, dark-haired Fred (description sound familiar?) was fiercely loyal to the company and to Rupert, sort of like a whining little puppy would stick close to its crabby master.

Joe Fool cost his parents a great deal of money when he wasn't born until New Year's Day, thus preventing them from declaring a dependent on the previous year's income tax. They never forgave him for it. Well, also because until the age of 16, he suffered from a mysterious gland condition which caused his body to emit the most foul odors imaginable. When it disappeared just as mysteriously and he smelled fresh air for the first time, he decided he didn't like it, so he enrolled in college to pursue a degree in sanitation. After graduating with straight D's, he was hired as R. C. Gumby Productions' chief janitor. Two days later, Joe was promoted to technical director, but then demoted back to janitor after he ate Rupert's last cheese danish and threw it up all over a stack of DVD's of their first movie production. Somewhat on the morose side, Fool spent most of his time complaining about the state of everything, especially his non-existent social life.

Not really an employee so much as a mascot was Digger, Rupert's pet beagle. His 18-year-old pet beagle. In dog years, Digger was so old that he was paper trained with papyrus. Although a loyal dog, having been quite helpful to the company on a number of occasions, sleeping was usually the only thing he ever did by this time. None of Rupert's employees understood why he would take a dog who should have been put in assisted living a long time ago into the field for movie roles or assignments for their talk show. Digger tended to just ignore everything that went on around him, unless there was food or sleep involved.

Everything and everyone was in place to start production on the talk show. Rupert was in front of the camera. Jerry, Rhoda, and Gary were in the control room. Ima was just off camera ready to assist. Ab was just off camera ready to drive everyone bananas. Homer was just off camera adjusting the camera. Myran was just off camera ready to fix anything that broke during recording. Fred was just off camera doing nothing at all. And Joe was in full view of the camera, sweeping up the floor right behind Rupert. Jerry gave the signal, and Rupert started.

"Hello, viewers. Welcome to a new episode of 'It's a Weird World.' And this time we have a special treat in store-" He paused, hearing something behind him. He turned around and saw Joe absent-mindedly sweeping in front of the camera. "Joe! Why are you sweeping the studio now!?"

"For ten dollars an hour. And I want a raise," Joe answered.

"Go on, beat it! Get outta the picture!" Rupert shouted, pushing Joe off camera. His temper still inflamed, he griped, "Can't we have just one show start off without something stupid happening!?"

"Oh, calm down, Rupert!" Myran retorted. "This isn't a bad start by anyone's standard!"

Suddenly there was a loud, boiling sizzle followed by an eruption, followed by hot coffee spraying all over the studio and all the lights going out.

"Oh phooey!" cried Ab. "Why do I always put the coffee in the toaster instead of the coffee maker?"

"Don't say it, Rupert," muttered Myran. "Just don't say it."

"Only if you bring me a flashlight."

After Jerry and Myran repaired the circuit breakers, the rest of the broadcast went on much as it did every time, with two arguments breaking out, half the equipment shorting out, and the guest speaker leaving early to change his name and move out of state.

An hour later, Rupert was seated at his desk, with Homer and Fred beside him. The first interview for sound engineer wasn't due until later, so Rupert spent the time until then working out programming ideas for upcoming episodes. Homer and Fred watched closely as Rupert jotted down notes on his paper, and Homer offered helpful suggestions.

"Rupert, that is the dumbest idea you've ever had."

Rupert, ever adamant with his programing decisions, responded firmly to Homer, "What do you mean, dumb!? I've had this planned for three weeks!"

"A film of the feeding habits of Peruvian llamas?"

"What's wrong with that? Lots of people like nature shows! Besides, its either that or an old Popeye cartoon."

Fred tried to offer assistance. "C'mon, Homer! Rupert has a pretty good point there. We should be offering more variety in our webcasts, and I'd say nature videos are more varieting than what we usually do."

"'Varieting'?" Homer asked. "Where'd you get that word?"

"From your resume," Fred answered innocently, and received a black eye from Homer.

"Knock it off, you two!" Rupert growled, "If I want to watch two men pound each other's brains out, I'll put on a Three Stooges short!"

"That's _three_ men pounding each other's brains out," said Homer.

Rupert gave Homer a threatening look. "I can make _this_ three!"

From the control room, Jerry shouted, "I'll toss all three 'a ya onto a hockey rink and play demolition derby with your fannies if you don't break it up right now!"

Homer was about to give her a defiant cheap shot when Rupert held up a quick hand to silence him, and quietly warned, "I've seen her on the ice. She needs a weapons permit to carry a hockey stick."

Satisfied that distraction was over, Jerry went back to her struggles to fix the broken audio mixer for the umpteenth time. "Joe, can you gimme a hand?" she asked in desperation.

"Which one do you want, the left or the right?" Joe answered in his usual sarcastic manner.

"I'll give you my left _and_ my right if you don't watch that smart mouth of yours!" she snapped.

"Joe?" retorted Feathers. "A _smart_ mouth?"

"Polly wanna a cracker shoved up her ass?" retorted Joe.

"Joey wanna broom handle shoved up _his_!?"

"Knock it off, you two!" shouted Ima, stomping into the control room. To Jerry, she asked, "What's wrong with the mixer now?"

"The motherboard shorted out. Again! Any more short circuits, and I swear this thing's gonna melt!"

"Rupert!" Ima called out. "Isn't it time to get a new audio mixer? And I mean a new one instead of digging one out of a junkyard!"

Rupert entered in the control room, replying, "Do you know how much audio mixers cost these days? You saw how much money we've got left in the treasury!"

"What about the emergency fund?"

"All gone," Rhoda replied.

Everyone turned to Rhoda, who was sitting at another control station, trying to build a house out of saltine crackers. "What do you mean, gone!?" demanded Rupert.

"It was an emergency! You've seen on the news about all the drug-resistant bacteria! How much longer before they finally mount their raid on that big narcotics cartel operating on the coast!? As conscientious citizens, we have to be ready to help out in any way we can when our bacterial brethren declare all-out war on drugs! So I used the emergency fund to buy a three-year supply of vanilla-flavored spatulas, so when those big, nasty drug pushers try to sneak out of whatever bowling alley they're skiing in, we'll be ready to give 'em what for!"

It took five full seconds for everyone else to digest what Rhoda said. And it gave all of them indigestion. Finally, hesitantly, Ima asked, "Rhoda . . . why are the spatulas vanilla flavored?"

Rhoda gave her a look like it was the silliest question in the world, and she responded with the silliest answer in the world: "Oh come on! You can't use _strawberry_-flavored spatulas in a drug raid!"

Feathers gave Ima an exasperated look. "Why do you keep asking for it?" she demanded.

"Well, a spatula isn't gonna fix this mixer, vanilla or otherwise," Jerry complained. "I spent fifty-odd years around electronics and machines, and I have no idea how this one managed to keep going this long! And as far as I can see, it ain't gonna go anymore!"

Just then Myran came in. "Not necessarily, Jerry. Let me take a look at it." He pulled out his communicorder from his shirt pocket. Using the built-in scanner, Myran analyzed the monitor and easily detected the fault. "Adjust that component right there and tighten the lead wires," he instructed Jerry.

Jerry did as Myran suggested, and was amazed to see the mixer come back on as if nothing had ever been wrong with it. "Well, I'll be doggoned! Thanks, Myran!"

"No need for thanks. I was just being helpful."

"Helpful isn't the word for it!" declared Fred. "You fixed our webcam, you more than tripled our bandwidth, you hooked up Chip as a backup server when ours exploded . . and now you're setting up a transporter for us!"

"Trans-_mat_," Myran corrected.

"Whatever you call it," Fred continued, "once it's finished, we'll be able to teleport ourselves anywhere on the planet instantly! Think how many more on-location reports we could do, and how much farther away we could do 'em!"

"That's fine," Rupert said. Turning to Myran, he added, "But where are you going to get the power to run it? You're sure as hell not gonna plug it into my electric outlets!"

"Are you joking? Your society's power relay systems could never deliver the necessary energy. I've set up my own portable generator which runs on matter-energy conversion. Just put some matter into it, and it can produce more energy than your entire planet makes in one month."

"Jeanie and I could use one of those at home," Gary said. "You wouldn't believe how much it costs to refrigerate our swimming pool."

"Just one thing," Myran continued. "I worry that the transmat's energy patterns might adversely affect my communicorder's circuitry until I make sure they're properly shielded. Homer, would you put my communicorder someplace safe?"

"Okay, Myran," Homer replied, taking the precious piece of technology from Myran.

"Of course, it's very unlikely the transmat energy _would_ damage it," Myran added, "but why take chances?"

"You're taking chances by letting Homer handle your communicorder," Rupert answered.

As Homer left, Myran chided, "Rupert, if you're going to expect your staff to cooperate with you, you're going to have to trust them. They're just trying to help."

"If _you_ keep just trying to help, you'll be in big trouble with the Planetary Exploration Committee," Ima warned. "You weren't supposed to tell anyone you're an alien to begin with."

"I don't think we have a lot to worry about. The directive of non-interference refers to normal planetary development, and no one would ever accuse any of you of being normal."

Ab Normal suddenly woke up from a daze she'd been in for the past two minutes. "Did somebody call me?" she asked.

"No, Ab," said Joe. "Go back to sleep."

"Oh, I wasn't asleep, Joe!" she replied. "I was just sitting here thinking!"

"The strain must've been horrible."

"Shut up, Joe!" barked Jerry. To Ab, she asked in a much kinder tone, "What were you thinking about, Abigail?"

" . . . . . I forgot."

"The strain was too much," said Joe.

"Too much what?" asked Ab. "Too much money? Then why don't we buy a cheaper strain next time? Or maybe we should find something else to drain our spaghetti with. Or strain it. Hey, have you ever noticed that? You drain with a strain! Isn't that neat? It rhymes! Like Joe rhymes with hoe! Except you can't hoe right now because it's winter, unless you're Santa Claus of course, then you can hoe-hoe-hoe. Which is funny, 'cause I never knew Santa Claus was a farmer! What kind of vegetables can he grow up at the North Pole? Maybe iceberg lettuce? Or snow peas? Gee, is that what I'm gonna find in my stocking next Christmas? What kind of stockings do you wear, Joe?"

Several seconds of silence unexpectedly followed as Ab waited for an answer from Joe, who just stood there staring at Ab. Finally, he asked, "What happened to you?"

"I'll tell you what happened to her!" Ima snapped. "Male chauvinist pigs like you, always assuming every girl in the world is stupid! And then _they_ assume everyone else will assume they're stupid, so they just let themselves become stupid because they assume it's no point trying to become smart 'cause no man will ever take them seriously! Not to mention those same male chauvinist pigs convince them that if they _were_ smart, no man would ever give 'em the time of day and they'd grow up to be lonely old spinsters! Like us women even _need_ men around to be happy! _I_ never needed a man to make _my_ life worthwhile! I never needed a man for _anything_, least of all to tell me how smart or stupid I could be!"

"Ima, you're foaming at the mouth again," said Jerry.

"This is why the court ordered you to have rabies shots!" added Gary.

"C'mon, dear," added Jerry, gently taking Ima by the shoulders and steering her out of the control room. "Let's go work off all that angry energy outside. I'll break out the snowboards."

After Jerry and Ima left to go outside, and Joe left to go mope around some more, Rupert filled up his mug from the coffee maker, which had a fresh batch of coffee in it after the toaster debacle. He took one sip and promptly spit it out. "Blecck! I thought Gary was going to make the coffee this time!"

"Fred said he wanted to take a stab at it," Gary said.

"I'd have a better chance at surviving if he stabbed _me_!"

"Don't you like my coffee?" asked Fred. "I used an old family recipe, grinding the beans between the jaws of a mammoth!"

"Next time, tell the mammoth to take a breath mint first!" After a brief pause, he asked, "Hey Fred, where are the rest of the resumes? I only found one on my desk this morning."

"That's the only one you have."

"That's all!? How come we only have one applicant scheduled for today!?"

Fred hesitated with his answer. "Well . . it's not so much we only have one applicant for today . . . more like, we only have one applicant, period."

"WHAT!? We sent out emails, tweets, we announced the search on our website and at least three dozen job sites! Not to mention every employment agency in every Mid-Atlantic state! And only _one person_ answered!?"

Rupert spun around toward Chip. "Chip, you've been monitoring the internet, didn't anybody else send _any_ kind of response?"

"Affirmative," Chip reported. "In addition to the one applicant scheduled for interview today, there have been five hundred seventeen replies to the job posting.

"_Five hundred seventeen!?_" exclaimed Rupert. "And you didn't report this because . . .!?"

"Because none of them indicated interest in applying for the position."

Nonplussed, Rupert nevertheless replied, "Well, what _did_ they say?"

"Response number one read, 'Why would I want to work for you bozos?' Response number two read, 'Get the hell off the web!' Response number three read, 'I wouldn't work at your dumb studio if you paid me a trillion bucks!' Though I fail to understand why she would be under the misapprehension that you would compensate her services with male deer, or that such a number of male deer even exists on Earth."

"Maybe she'll take some doe instead of bucks," suggested Fred. Everyone ignored him.

"Response number four was quite illogical, an invitation for us to engage in an anatomically impossible variation of the act of procreation. Response number five-"

"All right, all right!" Rupert interrupted, "We get the point!"

Just then a young woman with dark brown hair walked into the control room and exclaimed, "Hey Rupert! Am I interrupting anything important?"

"Iva!" exclaimed Rupert, "we're in the middle of very important Productions business!"

"So that's a no, then."

Iva Blister wasn't a member of the R. C. Gumby Productions staff, she was Rupert's sister who lived down the street. She considered it her personal mission to monitor Rupert's life and let him know when he was doing something useless or stupid or weird. In her opinion, that covered pretty much everything he did.

"If you're gonna barge into my house, can't you at least knock!?"

"And risk having one of your pals answer the door? I just showered this morning!"

"Are you saying were contaminated or something!?" snapped Fred.

To Fred, she retorted, "If stupid is contagious, your so-called studio ought to be declared a quarantine zone!"

"Nobody forces you to come here, you know!" Rupert retorted back.

"I had to _this_ time! Don't you remember? The clothes for the Good Will? The truck'll be here any minute!"

"Oh, that." Rupert impatiently thumbed past the control room. "They're in a wicker basket in the garage."

"Okay!" Iva turned partly to leave, but hesitated in order to add, "You don't mind if I take the whole basket, do you? Just to help carry everything."

"Only if you promise _this_ time to return it right away! I don't want to have to go to your house with a search warrant again to get back something you 'borrowed'!"

"Ex-_cuse_ me!?" she demanded. "I'm still waiting for you to return the cordless drill you borrowed three _months_ ago!"

"_I_ didn't borrow your drill - _Rhoda_ borrowed your drill!"

Iva turned to Rhoda and demanded, "Okay, so where's my cordless drill?"

"_Your_ cordless drill!?" Rhoda demanded back, suddenly outraged. "It's not 'yours' anymore! I set it free!"

" . . . 'Set it free'!?" Iva repeated, wondering for the life of her what Rhoda meant, and at the same time afraid of what it meant.

"All day long, nothing but laying around in a cold, dark closet with no one to play cribbage with! Brought out of the dark only for brief periods where some heartless person like you jams it into a hunk of wood to drill holes in it, nearly choking it to death on shavings and sawdust! Well, no more! I took it out into the woods and set it free, so it can fly south for the winter with all the other cordless drills, and chainsaws, and vacuum cleaners, raise a family of baby drill bits, and live happily ever after in the wilds of downtown Tallahassee!"

Rhoda put her hand firmly on Iva's shoulder, looked her straight in the eye, and declared, "Someday, you'll thank me for this, Iva!"

Several silent seconds of Iva just staring in disbelief at Rhoda were finally broken when Iva muttered, "I'm outta here."

She turned to leave. Fred followed her, saying, "Hold on! Do you know where the Good Will clothes are?"

"Rupert told me! A wicker basket in the garage!"

"But do you know how to get into the garage?"

"Yes! I've been here enough times to find out!"

"Then can you show _me_ how? I keep forgetting!"

Once they were gone, Myran said, "Rupert, if you don't need me for the interview, Chip and I need to finish work on the transmat."

"Myran, you ought to be careful with all that alien tech you brought with you," said Jerry. "If it ever fell into the wrong hands, it'd be a disaster!"

"Relax, Jerry," he assured her. "All the technology I brought is completely under control." With that, he and Chip left the control room.

Rupert turned to everyone left in the room and asked, "Does anyone else think we're finally tipping the plot?"

Everyone else nodded.

**The name of Fred Flintstone is copyright originally to Hanna-Barbera but now to Warner Brothers (I think). No other intention to declare ownership is implied. However, all other characters in this chapter are mine, so there!**


	3. The New Kid on the Block

**Chapter 2**  
><strong>The New Kid on the Block, or<strong>  
><strong>Hello, We Must Be Going<strong>

Rupert, Ima, Jerry, and Gary sat around Rupert's kitchen table facing the only applicant they had for the position of sound engineer: an elderly man with a light grey mustache and goatee. Fred escorted him into the kitchen to a seat at the table opposite the four interviewers, and Rupert picked up the applicant's resume and began:

"Your name is Jacob Thomas Cooperstown Beanbag Sliding Franklin Grape Jelly on Toasted Wheat with an Orange Wedge and a Glass of Milk Peterson, the Fourth. You graduated cum laude from St. Bernie's College of Communications and Plastic Surgery, majoring in film production and minoring in nose jobs. You started out in Bounding, Maine as assistant sound engineer in a recording studio before moving to a position sculpting heads for crash test dummies. Then you took a position with a cable access channel in Ershal, Mass. After that, you ran your own business for four years, performing plastic surgery for criminals leaving the country. Then five years designing license plates, and then a stint as a studio technician for NBC News in New York, which lasted roughly three minutes."

Rupert put down the resume and addressed the applicant directly. "Mr. Peterson, based on the information you've given us, what do you think you can contribute to this company as sound engineer?"

Peterson just stared at Rupert and the others for several seconds without responding, until finally, "I'm sorry, Son, I can't hear a word you're saying. My hearing aid's been on the fritz for weeks."

By the looks on their faces, Rupert and the others were trying to think of comments that wouldn't get censored from this novel. Finally, Rupert stood up, held out his hand and replied, "Well, thank you for coming, Mr. Peterson, we have no more questions. Good day."

Peterson stood up, took Rupert's offered hand, and shook it, asking, "Do I get the job?"

"We'll let you know." No we won't, he thought to himself.

"Oh good! I'll call!" With that, Peterson turned and allowed Fred to escort him from the kitchen.

A few seconds later, Ab and Rhoda came into the kitchen. "That was quick," said Rhoda. "How did the interview go?"

"I think he has promise," answered Gary.

"If the promise is that he'll never come back, I'll take it," Ima muttered.

"It's too bad he didn't work out," Jerry noted. "His resume said his hobbies included skydiving, spelunking, and rugby." To Rupert, she added, "Did you keep his phone number?"

Rupert wasn't paying attention. He was looking at Ab's bare feet and seemed unsure of how to phrase his next question. Or maybe he was afraid of what the answer would be. "Ab . . . why do you have peanut butter all over your feet?"

"And on a probably related question," said Ima, pointing at Rhoda's hand, "what are _you_ doing with an empty peanut butter jar?"

Ab looked down at her feet, waited for a very dim light bulb to go off in her head, and replied, "Oh, that! Rhoda was showing me a new way to cure athlete's foot!"

"Athlete's foot?" repeated Jerry.

"Yeah! I know, it sounds silly that I'd have an athlete's foot, and me not being an athlete . . . unless I had a transplant done without noticing! Is that possible?"

"A volcano could erupt right under this house and you wouldn't notice!" retorted Joe as he appeared behind them in a frustrated mood, with Feathers tightly squeezed between his hands. "Rhoda, tell your talking feather duster here if she builds a nest out of my mops one more time, we're having roast parrot for supper!"

"It's a frame-up!" shouted Feathers. "I haven't gone anywhere near your stinking mops! I haven't gone anywhere near your stinking broom closet!"

"Oh yeah!? Why are my mops as bald as you're going to be when I'm through plucking you!?"

"If I had to guess . . ." Rupert began. "Joe, you mopped up the studio right after this morning's recording, right?"

"Right."

"And shortly before our interview this afternoon, I went into my bedroom which is right underneath the studio and found there were several large holes eaten through the ceiling."

With mild but genuine surprise, Joe replied, "Really?"

"Joe . . ." asked Rupert, with seemingly infinite patience, "by any chance, did you get the floor soap mixed up with the drain cleaner again?"

Realization slowly dawned on Joe, who finally said, "So _that's_ why the bathtub is still clogged but smells like lemons. Great, what am I gonna use to mop the floors now?"

Rupert's seemingly infinite patience vanished. "Use your face!" he snarled. "And whatever's left of the drain cleaner!"

"There isn't any," Joe replied. "I just used the last of it in the coffee maker."

"You _what_!? You don't use drain cleaner to clean a coffee maker!" shouted Ima.

". . _Clean_ it?"

"That's it, I'm switching to tea," said Jerry.

Myran and Chip entered the kitchen. Myran said, "The transmat is finished. Now we can transmit to any on-location site we want anywhere on this planet. We even installed a timer-delay so I can beam out with you, _and_ remote control protocols that are compatible with my communicorder's transmission frequency."

"Never mind all that!" said Ab impatiently. "Can we go places with it?"

"That is precisely what my Creator articulated," Chip replied.

"Sure, but what did he _say_?"

Chip looked up at Myran, his Creator, and said, "My apologies, Creator, but I detect that another one of my logic junctions has suddenly burned out."

"There's a shocker," muttered Joe.

"And here's another one!" said Feathers. And she promptly bit Joe's thumb.

With a screech of pain, Joe released Feathers, who immediately flew out of his reach and landed on Rhoda's head. "I'll have the SCPA on you so fast, it'll blow the stink right off you!"

"Warp drive isn't that fast," Ima retorted.

"Speaking of warp drive," said Jerry, turning to Myran, "are you sure it's okay having all this alien tech here? What if the place gets robbed or something?"

"Nobody's robbing _us_!" insisted Rupert. "I've had the whole place wired for security ever since I started this business! No alien or human tech's getting stolen from here!"

"And Chip and I have made enough improvements on it that no technology known to humans could breach it. Trust me, none of my equipment will fall into the wrong hands."

"Your communicorder fell into Homer's hands," Joe pointed out. "What could be more wrong than that?"

Fred came back into the kitchen and, having overheard the most recent exchange, added, "Not to mention you let a total stranger play with your anti-gravity harness!"

Confused, Myran asked, "What are you talking about?"

Fred led everyone out of the kitchen toward the front door, complaining, "I was just showing Mr. Peterson out, and here's this guy at the front door breaking the law of gravity!"

Everyone gathered around as Fred opened the door to reveal a man, maybe mid-thirties or so, seated serenely in a lotus position. His hands rested on his knees, his eyes were closed, and his entire body floated about three feet above the front stoop.

"See!? What's so special about him that _he_ gets to wear your harness and not us!?"

"He's not wearing my harness," said Myran, "_I_ am." He lifted up his shirt just enough to reveal the strap-on, gravity-canceling harness he brought to Earth for emergencies.

"_You_ are?" asked Fred, thrown for a loop. "Then . . . how . . . ?"

Everyone else stared in amazement at their levitating visitor, who slowly opened his eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I decided to meditate while I was waiting for you."

He slowly descended until he was actually sitting on the stoop, whereupon he rose to his feet.

" . . . . O-o-o-h - ka-a-ay," Ima slowly replied.

"Why were you waiting for us?" asked Jerry.

"To apply for the position of sound engineer at your studio. I must apologize for not contacting you first, but I felt our chakras coming into ideal resonance for a face-to-face meeting rather quickly."

" . . . What'd he say?" asked Fred.

"I think he said he's an applicant," declared Rupert. He gestured toward the kitchen. "Please, come in."

The visitor nodded with a smile and followed them into the kitchen. "What's your name?" asked Rupert.

"Philip Harmonik. Please, call me Phil."

"Phil," Rupert repeated. Then he realized: "Phil Harmonik."

Feathers groaned. "That's one point in his favor with _this_ crowd."

"So . . you're into meditation?" asked Gary.

"I'm not 'into' anything. I aspire to achieve perfect spiritual harmony with the universe. And from what I've seen of your company's productions, you're in desperate need of harmony. In addition to offering myself for the position of sound engineer, I offer my experience in helping you to achieve inner peace, and by extension of your productions, bring inner peace to your viewers and customers."

Joe started chanting the instrumental theme to _The Twilight Zone_, while Homer recited, "You are entering another dimension. A dimension of sight and sound, where gravity and sanity are optional -"

"Shut up!" barked Rupert.

Phil gave Rupert a tut-tut look. "That is one of the things I'm talking about. Too often I've seen on your webcasts how loud, unruly, and ill-tempered you and our colleagues are with each other. Not at all conducive to a state of calm. If I had still been meditating when you yelled at them just now, I would've been jolted out of my zero state so hard, I would've crashed back out through the front door and nosedived into the rock garden."

"To be honest," Gary replied, "we don't really think much about how relaxing our webcasts are."

"Relaxation is very important for the mind and body, especially in such a stress-filled environment as this, with so many deadlines and budgetary concerns. Everyone should have an effective means of cleansing yourselves of negative energy through relaxation." Phil turned to Ima. "You're Ima Nutt, right? What do you do to relax?"

"I drink coffee."

Harmonik shook his head as if it was the wrong answer.

"It's decaf!" she protested.

"You think we'd let her drink caffeinated?" added Feathers.

Phil wasn't satisfied. "It doesn't matter whether it has caffeine or not. You can't achieve true inner peace with a chemical substance."

"Are you trying to sneak an anti-drug message into this novel!?" snapped Homer.

"I'm simply trying to say that inner peace must come from within, not from without."

"Well, when I drink the coffee, it ends up _within_ me," Ima insisted, "so what's the problem?

Before Phil could answer, Rupert held up his hands between him and Ima. "Phil, Ima, let's continue this some other time. How about next July? Right now, we need to see if this man will make a good sound engineer, so Phil, how about telling us a little about yourself?"

"Certainly." As he began, Rupert, Ima, Gary, and Jerry sat back down in their same chairs at the kitchen table, while Phil took the seat reserved for the previous applicant. The rest of the staff gathered around the edges of the kitchen to watch.

"I was born in a New York suburb on Long Island. I don't know exactly which one, they blend together so much, it's impossible to tell where one ends and another begins."

"Like the metal and the rust in my car," said Joe.

Phil continued. "The night of my sixth birthday, I had an out-of-body experience in my dreams. In it, I journeyed to a higher level of existence, a realm far above the world we live in."

"You visited the International Space Station!?" asked Ab.

"Impossible," reported Chip. "Based upon scans of ten different indicators of Mr. Harmonik's physical age, I calculate a 99.3% probability that your International Space Station did not exist yet when he was six Earth-years of age."

"Then where did the Millennium Falcon park?"

"There was a parking garage on one of the Telstar satellites," Joe wisecracked.

"This is why I don't let the rest of you in on job interviews!" snapped Rupert.

"And anyway," Myran spoke up, "I think Phil is talking about something more than just going up above the Earth. He means a plane of existence beyond our own physical universe, like being able to escape the confinements of our three-dimensional space and exist in geometries of higher dimensions, which our brains aren't even capable of visualizing."

"Well," Phil conceded, "if you want to make a pointless attempt to reduce it to mathematics, then on a very basic level you're correct. It was a plane where all things had clear meaning, and all meanings were clear. This was the ultimate existence."

With a slight sigh of regret, he continued, "But I couldn't stay. I realized I had to reach this level of being on my own, down a long road of hard work, not through a free ride."

"Good idea," said Fred. "Hitchhiking's dangerous."

Despite the lame-sounding comparison, Phil seemed to agree wholeheartedly. "I once heard about a fellow devotee who tried to attain higher understanding through a kind of spiritual hitchhiking." His face fell into a sorrowful look. "He used to be one of the most brilliant spiritualists the world ever knew."

"What is he now?" asked Jerry.

"The Teletubbies' biggest fan."

"Yikes!" said Rupert. "So, what kind of work was involved?"

"From that day on, I studied everything I could find on metaphysics, spiritualism, transcendentalism, and of course all the world's different religions and philosophies. My parents . . didn't quite know what to make of my search for ultimate truth."

"They thought you had one too many turns on the merry-go-round?" asked Joe.

"I know what that's like!" Rhoda griped. "Can you believe that, to this day, my parents _still_ think I'm strange?"

"Yes!" replied everyone else except Phil.

" . . . . You could've at least hesitated a little."

"Maybe my parents _did_ think I was no longer in my right mind," Phil mused. "But at the time, I hardly noticed. And in the course of my studies, I discovered there was so much more to the world than what we see with our own senses. So much that is beyond our ability to grasp or comprehend. You might call it magic or superstition, but it's so much more than that, and it's real. It's all around us. You can find it for yourself, if you know where to look."

"Here it comes," muttered Homer, "his trip to Tibet or something."

"When I was 17, I journeyed to Tibet -"

"Eat your heart out, Kreskin."

"- to study first-hand under the wise men who have inherited the thousands of years of wisdom -"

"That's just typical!" growled Ima. "It's always wise _men_, isn't it!? Never wise _women_! Men NEVER pay any attention to how much _women_ know or how smart _women_ are! You ask any man in the world, even the ones who CLAIM they're enlightened and can see beyond the fifth dimension, and they can't even imagine any woman being anywhere near as smart as they CLAIM to be, let alone let any woman into their chauvinistic, old-boy-network, secret societies!" She leaned forward right into Phil's face and snarled, "You men are _scum_!"

"You sure you drink only decaf?" asked Gary.

"SHUT UP!"

When attention was turned back toward Phil, he had his eyes closed and his palms pressed together in front of his head, and he appeared to be doing deep-breathing exercises. After several moments of this, his slowly opened and he sighed, "I'm all right now. I'm centered again." He looked straight at Ima and said, "That is another thing I was talking about. Too many of you clearly have deep, boiling wells of rage buried within you, ready to erupt at a moment's notice. You simply cannot continue like this."

He seemed to be looking straight through Ima by this point no, straight _into_ her. "You seem to have a pathological hatred of men. Could it be due to negative experiences you've had with men? Or that other men have inflicted upon you? Enough to burn their marks onto your very soul?"

"So now you're a psychoanalyst as well as a spiritualist!?" she demanded. "Maybe I just think that a woman doesn't need a man to make her life complete! And maybe I'm just sick and tired of men thinking a woman _does_ need a man to make her life complete! And sick of women who fall for it when men tell them women need men to make their lives complete!"

"And sick of men who like women who fall for men telling them women need men and take advantage of women who need men who need women who don't even like men who need women needing men!" exclaimed Rhoda.

Everyone else, including Ima, gave Rhoda strange looks, until she pointed at Ima and insisted, "_She_ started it!"

"And I'm ending it!" insisted Rupert.

"With respect, Mr. Gumby," insisted Phil, "I must point out another person here with a deeply troubled soul." He turned to the troubled soul and continued, "You, Homer Zelchel, also have a lot of buried anger that is slowly poisoning you. I want to help you release your emotional burden and find your center again."

"I already know where my center is, it's right here," Homer replied, pointing at his midriff just above his waist.

"That's your center of _mass_," said Myran.

"With his diet, more like his center of _mess_," quipped Joe.

"_You're_ gonna be a mess in about two seconds!" growled Homer.

"Gentlemen, please!" insisted Phil.

Fred looked around in confusion. "_What_ gentlemen?"

Phil stood up from his chair and approached Homer closely. "Homer, I can feel great pain within you, pain that drives your aura into its state of excessively negative energy. It's not the only driving force, but it contributes, and we can at least end its contribution if you confront it directly. Without its influence, you can start to unlink the chains holding your spirit captive, until it is once more free to ascend to a higher state of being."

" . . . . If I _do_ tell you, will you get out of my personal space? You're scaring the hell outta me."

With a sigh of resignation, Phil backed off. Homer kept his word and explained, "I suppose what bothers me most is losing my mother."

Ima looked at Phil and asked, "You sure you want to hear about this?"

Her tone suggested she wasn't concerned about the emotional impact, but rather the logical impact. Perhaps not realizing the difference, Phil replied, "Of course, Ima." He turned back to Homer and said, "Please, go on."

"It was about ten years ago. She went for surgery at the dentist and there were . . . complications. Due to her being allergic to novocaine."

"They didn't know, and she . . . "

"Oh no, they knew about her allergy, so they used gas instead. But then the dentist was called away to the phone and accidentally left the gas on, and she got pumped up with too much."

"That's terrible. So the gas killed her?"

"No one knows. They lost radar contact with her over France."

Several moments of silence followed as Phil just stared at Homer . . . Better get used to it, these sudden weird punchlines and awkward pauses happen a lot in this story.

Finally, Phil said, "I think that's enough healing for now." He sat back down.

Rupert tried to get things back on track, as warped as the tracks were. "So, Phil . . . ." He failed. "What were we talking about?"

"When I was 17, I journeyed to Tibet -" said the voice of Phil.

"Eat your heart out, Kreskin," said the voice of Homer.

"- to study first-hand under the wise men who have inherited the thousands of years of wisdom -" said the voice of Phil, which everyone now realized was actually coming from Chip, just as Homer's voice just did.

"At that point," said Chip in his own voice, "Ima became highly agitated and disrupted the normal course of the employment interview, however I calculate it unnecessary to replay that section of my memory in detail."

"Thank A.I. algorithms for small mercies," muttered Rupert. To Phil, "How long did you study in Tibet?"

"Eighteen months. After that, I visited India, Southeast Asia, the Australian Outback and several Native American reservations. I talked with scholars and philosophers from many different cultures all over the world, and have come to believe that what we think of as many distinct philosophies and faiths may in fact be one and the same as seen from different points of view. Someday, I hope to prove it."

"I don't know about sound engineer," said Feathers, "but he'd be perfect for a job as a . . . . as a . . . . I have _no_ idea."

"Well, uh, Phil," said Rupert, "to sum up, what do you think makes you the right choice as sound engineer for our company?"

"As I said, I can help your company become, if you'll pardon the theft of an old political phrase, "kinder and gentler." I sensed from the beginning how discordant and chaotic the collective karma was in this place. If this is allowed to continue, your tenuous spiritual union will certainly die. I could help you find harmony again, help your souls find their centers, help you cleanse yourselves of the bad karma soiling your hearts and minds and nullify the negative vibrations that are driving your auras out of synch with the universal song of truth and beauty.

"I could help you become one with the All."

Everyone else in the kitchen did nothing but give him strange looks for another awkward pause.

"Oh," Phil suddenly remembered, "and I have a Master's degree in Communications from Stanford, and seven years of experience as a sound engineer at three different radio and television stations in Massachusetts."

Rupert and the others quickly looked at each other, and then Rupert declared, "That's good enough for us. You're hired!"

Everyone stood up and gathered around Phil to shake his hand and welcome him to R. C. Gumby Productions, in their own ways. Homer's way was, "Don't say we didn't warn you." Feathers' way was, "You're a brave human, Phil." Joe's way was, "Good luck here. You're gonna need it."

"Luck is just an illusion invented by people who don't understand the cosmic forces which guide events in our favor," Phil replied to Joe.

"Then pray all your stars and planets are lined up just right. Actually, ask Myran, he must keep an eye on them all the time."

"Really?" Phil turned to Myran. "Do you study the movements and forces of the cosmos as well?"

"Only to watch out for any future detours in the local space lanes." He turned to Homer. "Speaking of monitoring space, Homer, would you please get my communicorder?"

Homer left the kitchen to fetch it, as Phil asked, "Space lanes? Communicorder?"

Rupert took this one: "Phil, now that you're a member of R. C. Gumby Productions, we can let you in on a little secret. Myran and Chip aren't just our technical support, they're aliens studying Earth's culture to see if we're ready for First Contact."

Phil looked at Myran, and his eyes slowly widened. "I _thought_ there was something different about you! Yes . . . more than anyone else I've ever met, you truly are one with the stars! You have the aura of a traveler and the soul of a being wise beyond almost any measure. And you're here to see if we humble human beings are worthy to share in a more enlightened existence out amongst the stars?"

"You could put it that way."

"Tell me, do you believe we _are_ ready?"

"To use a human phrase . . don't hold your breath."

Phil's face fell. "I was afraid of that." He then knelt down in front of Chip. "And you, Chip . . ." His face screwed up in confusion. "You are also different, but . . . your aura is more like that of . . . static electricity?"

"He's a robot," said Ima.

"A vague and somewhat archaic term," replied Chip. "I am an artificial intelligence in a mobile bipedal casing, with multiple sensory apparatus for continuous monitoring of external conditions."

"But . . . do you have a soul?" asked Phil.

"Of course he does!" said Ab. "He has two of them, right on the bottoms of his cute little feet!"

"Ab, let the big kids handle this, okay?" said Joe.

"Phil is asking if Chip is more than just a machine," explained Gary.

"Of course he is!" exclaimed Fred. "And even if he _started out_ as just a machine, ever since Myran brought him here, we've been teaching him all kinds of stuff about what it means to be more than that, to be a human being, to do and be all the things that make us human beings! How to lie, cheat, insult everybody . . . be illogical, cynical, greedy, an all-around horse's ass . . . We even taught him how to swear!"

"Unfortunately, they are damn good at teaching that," said Chip.

"Chip is going to need _so_ much deprogramming when we return home," Myran lamented.

Phil stood up and laid a sympathetic hand on Myran's shoulder. "I feel for you, my cosmic brother."

"Great," muttered Joe, "now we got two space cases here."

He glanced over at Ab, who was back in her private daze-land. "_Three_ space cases."

Homer returned. "And one hard case," added Joe.

Homer gave Joe a dirty look and retorted, "And one hard _head_."

After a few seconds of waiting, Myran decided he had to prompt him. "Homer? My communicorder?"

Homer gave him a look that was much too innocent to be real. "Communicorder?" he asked.

" . . . Homer!?" Myran instantly regretted trusting Homer with it.

"Don't tell me you lost it!?" exclaimed Rupert.

Homer instantly became defensive. "Of course not! I know exactly where I put it!"

Partially relieved, Myran replied, "Well, okay then!"

"But where I put it isn't there anymore!"

"Isn't there any !" from Rupert. "Where did you put it?"

"In the pocket of those old sweatpants on your bed."

"What did you put it in _there_ for!?"

"You're always saying we can't let Myran's alien tech fall into the wrong hands, so I hid it somewhere no one would think to look."

"And what would've happened if somebody threw those sweatpants in the wash while the communicorder was inside them!?" shouted Rupert. He looked around at everyone. "Is that what happened? Did somebody take them off my bed!?"

"I did," answered Joe. "But relax, I didn't throw 'em in the wash."

"Well, that's _some_ relief!" replied Myran. "Where did you put them?"

"In the garage."

Rupert needed a few moments to process that before asking, "Why in the garage!?"

"I thought those dirty old pants were your work clothes."

"I already _have_ work clothes in the garage! Didn't you notice them on the pegs next to the door!?"

"Yeah, that's why I didn't hang your pants on the pegs next to the door. I hung them on the peg over the recycle bins."

" . . . I don't have a peg over the recycle bins!"

Joe became nonplussed. "No wonder they kept falling on the floor."

Rupert had a sudden urge to bang his head against the nearest wall - or bang _Joe's_ head against the nearest wall - but he resisted long enough to order, "Just go get my sweatpants! NO, wait! _I'll_ get them! I'm not letting anyone else touch them!"

"Too late," said Fred.

Rupert turned slowly toward Fred, who was starting to look very afraid. Rupert became equally afraid of where this was going. "Fred? What did _you_ do with them!?"

Cringing, Fred stammered, "I - I thought they fell out of the Good Will basket . . so I put them in when your sister took it!"

"_You WHAT!?_"

"A-a-a-a-nd the plot begins," said Feathers.

**The name of Fred Flintstone is currently owned by Warner Brothers (I looked it up). No other intention to declare ownership is implied. All other characters in this chapter are copyright to me, so don't _you_ try to declare ownership of them!**


	4. The Search Begins

**Chapter 3**  
><strong>The Search Begins, or<strong>  
><strong>Charity Ends at Home<strong>

"Fred, you idiot!" yelled Joe. "How could you be so stupid!? Throwing Myran's communicorder into a basket of old clothes and getting it sent out to Good Will!?"

"_You're_ the one who tossed Myran's communicorder in the garage where it could _get_ thrown into the Good Will basket!" Homer shouted at Joe.

"And who stuffed it in a pair of sweatpants that someone _might_ toss into the garage, _instead_ of somewhere safe!?" Rupert shouted at Homer.

Ima rounded on Myran. "For that matter, what were _you_ thinking letting Homer handle your communicorder in the first place!?"

"And who shucked Oliver Stone's rutabagas before they were ripe so he ended up eating rutabaga Florentine that was bitter and gave him heartburn!?"

"Not now, Rhoda!" shouted Rupert.

"If the wrong humans find my communicorder and reverse engineer it," said Myran, "they could alter the technological development of this entire planet! Or worse, gain an immense technological advantage over everyone else on the planet and use that advantage for their own ends!"

"They might even try to take over the world!" exclaimed Ab.

"How can you take over the world with a glorified cellphone?" scoffed Joe.

"Steve Jobs did," replied Gary.

Rupert exclaimed, "People, we've got to get to the Good Will shop right now and get that communicorder back! Ima, you take Rhoda, Gary, Ab, and Feathers in your car! Jerry, you take Myran and Chip in your motorcycle!"

Jerry turned to Myran and crowed, "Better strap your helmet on tight, young fella! I just put on new snow tires and souped up the engine again!"

"No fence-jumping on the way!" snapped Rupert. "Phil, you ride with me."

"What about us?!" said Fred, waiting next to Homer and Joe.

Rupert gave them an angry look. "You three can squeeze into the back seat of _my_ car! I'm not letting you idiots out of my sight! And just for good measure, you're dog-sitting Digger in the back seat with you!"

In a rare response to his name, Digger waddled into the kitchen. "Don't tell me you're taking Grampa Growl out of the house again!" exclaimed Ima. "When are you gonna realize he's too old!?"

"_Who's_ too old!?" retorted Jerry.

"You're different, Jerry! You must've been vaccinated with rocket fuel! Digger doesn't have your stamina, he won't last five minutes out of the house without staying conscious!"

"Hogwash!" Jerry bent down toward Digger, who was lying down again, and pet his back. "Don't you listen to that young fuddy-duddy, Boy! You got as much energy and gumption as any dog!"

Digger answered with a loud snore.

Jerry's eyes shifted around quickly, checking how many of the others were watching, and muttered sotto voice to Digger, "I'm tryin' to stick up for ya, Digger. Work with me!"

To everyone's dismay, the local Good Will shop had already shipped everything from Rupert's donation to the regional distribution center in Trenton. The drive there seemed to take hours, especially since Ima's car ran out of gas three miles from the nearest gas station. Ten humans, one alien in human form, one wisecracking parrot, one ancient dog, and one small robot were not about to cram into one car and a motorcycle, so they had to push Ima's car to the station. It was late afternoon by the time they got to the center. Everyone else waited outside while Rupert and Ima went inside to find the missing communicorder.

The front office of the distribution center was occupied only by a desk and computer, a few filing cabinets, a table with a coffee maker and a small printer, and the woman sitting at the desk. She was tall with curly-blonde hair and too much makeup, and for almost half a minute she didn't even acknowledge their arrival as she appeared to be too busy chewing gum and examining her nails for defects.

Another office directly adjoined the first one, which the visitors could see right into thanks to the large picture window in the wall separating them. The second office was similarly furnished but with more expensive-looking counterparts to the first office's furniture, and was occupied by a well-dressed man, probably shorter than the woman, with a small mustache, and a head of hair that was obviously a wig. Unlike the woman, he registered the arrival of the visitors almost immediately. He then looked at the woman, still sitting unresponsive at her desk, and for almost half a minute gave her an exasperated look that said her apathy was all too common.

Finally, he pressed a button on the large, old-fashioned intercom on his desk. His voice came over its counterpart on the woman's desk, in what sounded like some kind of Scandinavian accent: "Mrs. a-Wiggins, would ye please admit the-"

"Hello?" She pressed the Talk button on her intercom, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

An even more exasperated look from her boss, knowing he'd be unable to answer as long as her Talk button was depressed. When he failed to answer through no fault of his own, she let go of the intercom and went back to her nails.

He tried again: "Mrs. a-Wiggins, would ye please admit-"

"Hello?" She did it again. And again she couldn't get an answer, so she let go of the button.

Her boss tried a third time, and this time he hoped to get his instructions through by giving them so fast she wouldn't have time to cut him off:  
>"Mrs.a-Wigginswouldyepleaseadmitthe-"<p>

"Hellohellohellohellohello?" She was just as fast on the cut-off, and just as fast with her interruption.

Fed up, the man rose from his desk, walked to the door separating their offices, and stepped through to confront his secretary directly. "Mrs. a-Wiggins, if it won't take a-too much time out of yer busy schedule, we have a-visitors here. Would ye please a-take a-their names?"

It was several long moments before Mrs. Wiggins looked up from her nails toward her boss. Her boss cast his eyes toward the visitors in a blunt attempt to show her where they were. After several more long moments, she finally got the message and turned to the visitors, and looked at them like they were by far the least interesting things she'd ever seen.

"What are your names?" she muttered.

Hoping to get things quickly on track, Rupert elected to just press ahead. "I'm Rupert Gumby, and this is Ima Nutt, from R. C. Gumby Productions in Poker Bluffs."  
>With only the slightest acknowledgment, Wiggins went back to examining her nails.<p>

For several more long moments, nothing happened except for her boss staring at her expectantly. Then he finally prompted, "Well?"

She slowly looked up at him and replied, "They're Rupert Gumby and Ima Nutt, from R. C. Gumby Productions in Poker Bluffs," and then went back to her nails.

A few more moments later, her boss demanded, "Don't ye want te know why a-they're here?"

A few more long moments before she looked up and replied, "No."

Rupert turned to her boss. "Do _you_ want to know why we're here?"

Grateful for the reprieve, the man replied, "Yes, of course. Please a-come into my office."

He led them through the door and sat down behind his desk while they remained standing. They noticed the name plaque on his desk read, "Mr. Tudball."

"What can I do fer you?" he asked.

"A woman named Iva Blister made a donation of clothing to the Poker Bluffs Good Will shop earlier today," said Rupert. "They told us it was all sent here. One of my clothes that shouldn't be there got mixed up in it, and I need to get it back." It might have sounded like he was reneging on one donation item, but getting that highly-advanced and potentially-dangerous communicorder back was much more important than what somebody thought of him right now.

"Did a-someone ye know throw it in the basket a-without asking a-you?"

Mr. Tudball's question and understanding look surprised Rupert: "Uh - yes!"

"How'd you guess?" asked Ima.

"I didn't have te guess." Tudball gave his oblivious secretary a dirty look through the window. "My secretary once a-'donated' half a-my office furniture while I was out te lunch. If I hadn't a-got back early, my desk and chair would a-be in a resale shop in a-Timbuk-a-tu by now."

"Timbuktu?" repeated Ima. "Why so far away?"

"This is a international a-distribution center. We send a-donations all over the world from here."

"Meaning if we don't get my sweatpants back, they could end up anywhere in the whole world!?" demanded Rupert.

"The plot sickens," muttered Ima.

Tudball shuffled through the meager pile of papers on his desk, mumbling, "Let's see . . . From Miss a-Iva Blister of a-Poker Bluffs." Apparently not finding what he needed, he pressed his intercom button. "Mrs. a-Wiggins, would ye please a-bring the -"

"Hello?" She cut him off again!

Deciding he didn't want to go through all that again, Tudball flashed his secretary another dirty look through the window, got up, and stepped through their connecting door again. "Mrs. a-Wiggins, would ye _please_ a-bring me the file on a-donations brought in today from a Iva Blister of a-Poker Bluffs?" Then, leaving the door open, Tudball returned to his desk and sat down to wait.

It was nearly five full seconds after he sat down before Mrs. Wiggins finished examining her nails and pulled the retractable keyboard out from under her desk. Then, hunting and pecking one key at a time like a person who'd never even seen a keyboard in her entire life, she called up the file on Iva Blister after an agonizingly long time. She sent the command to print the file. Like her, the printer took way too long to complete its task, and only when it was complete did she stand up from her desk and shuffle ever so slowly to the printer. One by one - and I mean _one_ by _one_ - she slowly pulled each printed sheet from the printer, looked each one over for the longest time, and then arranged them in a neat stack and shuffled back to her desk with them. Slowly, she opened one of her desk drawers, pulled out a stapler, and then stapled the short stack of papers together. She put the stapler back, taking the extra time to return it to the exact place she found it, and closed the drawer. She then turned on her heel and slowly shuffled around the far side of her desk and toward the doorway into Mr. Tudball's office, at a pace that would let a sloth overtake her.

All the while, Tudball watched her progress with long-suffering disdain. As she finally crept to within a hair's-breadth of the door, he turned to his visitors and sarcastically muttered, "Better stand back, er the wind shear'll knock ye right over."

Wiggins suddenly - suddenly by _her_ standards - looked around as if _she_ thought she was going to be knocked over. When no such thing happened, she placed the stack of papers on Tudball's desk, turned on her heel, and slowly shuffled back to her office without a single word.

"I get the impression your secretary is a little slow," said Ima, her tone implying that it was really the most obvious bit of knowledge in the entire universe.

"You think?" replied Tudball, his tone implying Ima's tone implied absolutely correctly.

"So, why couldn't _you_ look up the information on your own computer?"

"Unfortunately, I'm a-very allergic te dust, and if ye think a-my secretary is a-slow te do her job, ye haven't a-seen the janitor yet. So every time I try te use a-the keyboard -"

Unfortunately, he absent-mindedly demonstrated typing a few keys on it, and stirred up a small but thick cloud of dust that went right into his face. His eyes and nose instantly wrinkled up and he started inhaling sharply, gearing up for a big sneeze. And when he finally let loose with, "Ah-CHOO!", the jerking action of his head flipped his cheap wig off the top of his head like a car hood suddenly flipping open, to hang by its front edge over his face!

The sight of Tudball's forehead suddenly having a hairy awning made Rupert and Ima stare silently for a few seconds, before Rupert finally gave a hesitant, "Gesundheit."

Tudball pushed his wig back down and read through the file. "I have a-good news and a-bad news. The good news is that Iva Blister's a-donation did arrive here on a-schedule."

"What's the bad news?" asked Rupert.

"The clothes have already been a-shipped out."

"Where!?"

Tudball finished reading through the file and replied, "It doesn't say here. Distribution of a-donations is in another file." He started to press his intercom button, but then thought better of it and instead, reluctantly, stood up and walked through the doorway into his secretary's office. "Mrs. a-Wiggins, I need the file -"

"Hello?" she interrupted _again_ while pressing the intercom button.

" - on the distribution of the donations brought in by Miss a-Iva Blister."

Wiggins did a double-take, and she pressed down harder on the intercom button. "_Hello_?" she asked again, totally surprised that she got an answer this time.

Tudball blew a short, sharp whistle, gradually attraction Wiggins' attention to the fact that he was standing right next to her desk. She slowly looked up toward him, and he repeated, "The distribution list of the donations brought in by Miss a-Iva Blister."

Wiggins gave him a blank look. He pointed with exaggeration at the computer. She looked toward the computer. Several moments later, she seemed to get the picture, and she pulled out the keyboard again and started hunting and pecking for each individual key necessary to call up the relevant file.

Tudball glanced at Rupert and Ima through the connecting door. "This a-may take a while," he muttered, "ye might as well a-get comfortable."

Rupert and Ima looked at each other; they both had a feeling he was right.

Except just a moment later, the outer door opened, and they heard Tudball say, "Well it's about a-time! I called you te clean a-my office an hour ago!"

"Must be the janitor," Ima muttered to Rupert.

Rupert looked out the window. He then looked askance at Ima and said, "This could take _another_ while."

At least half a minute later, the janitor finally wheeled his utility cart into Tudball's office at a pace that made Wiggins look like an Olympic sprinter. Rupert and Ima figured it was at least partially due to the fact that he looked over a hundred years old. Underneath a head of unkempt snow-white hair, his face bore a passing resemblance to Tudball's - maybe the janitor was his grandfather - and he looked like just shuffling halfway across Tudball's office was enough to exhaust him. He did have enough energy left to start wheezing a song to himself, but his tired, ancient, mumbling voice made it nearly impossible to understand most of the words.

Of course, since the song was "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, they wouldn't have understood the words anyway.

After parking the cart behind Tudball's desk, the janitor slowly pulled out a feather duster and started sweeping it across the desk, over the name plaque, over the computer monitor, kicking up clouds of dust in all directions. One of them went right into Ima's face, and she violently sneezed.

The janitor paused. He slowly raised his head toward Ima, and then he reached over and swept the feather duster across her face, sweeping off some dust before she vigorously shooed him away with, "Knock it off!" She let loose another violent sneeze.

Instead of dusting her face again, the old man replied with a slow, mumbled, "You should take something for that cold."

He resumed his dusting of the desk, this time over the intercom. In doing so, he must have tripped the Talk button, because a moment later, Wiggins' voice came out of the intercom saying, "Hello?"

The janitor paused briefly to respond with a mumbled, "Hello," and then resumed dusting.

Rupert was getting more and more impatient. "How much longer is this gonna take?" he demanded to no one in particular. He looked through the window to Wiggins' office, where she was _still_ hunting and pecking at the keyboard while Tudball looked exasperated enough to flip his wig again. "That communicorder could be flying out of the country already while we're standing here twiddling our thumbs and -"

He stopped when he realized the janitor was spritzing the back of his coat with furniture polish. Rupert turned around while the janitor continued spritzing, getting the spray around his side and front as well. Then the janitor began slowly wiping Rupert's front with a polishing cloth.

"Do I look like a piece of furniture to you!?" demanded Rupert.

"He _is_ polishing a chest, isn't he?" wisecracked Ima.

The janitor then slowly turned toward Ima, still holding the spray and cloth.

"Don't even _think_ about it!" she warned.

"_Can_ he think about it?" asked Rupert.

The janitor slowly turned back toward Rupert, and gave him a sly smile and wink.

"I guess he can."

To his surprise, Rupert felt uncontrolled giggles breaking through his normally deadpan demeanor at the ancient janitor being able to think about it.

"Oh, you think that's funny!?" snapped Ima.

Slight giggles escaped from Rupert's lips as he replied, "I can't help it! The thought of him - *Mmph!* - making a pass at you . . !"

"He better have plenty of life insurance if he does!"

"I just had another thought - him and Jerry!"

"Jerry!?" Ima exclaimed. "Even if she was interested, she'd run him right into the ground on the first date! _Before_ the first date! Do you know, the first guy she started dating after her husband died was fifteen years younger than her, a marathon runner, and a retired firefighter? Two days later, they had to put him on oxygen in a nursing home!"

Ima and Rupert suddenly whirled around. While they'd been talking, the janitor had shuffled over to the filing cabinet and started polishing the top of it. He apparently tripped the latch and the top drawer shot out of the cabinet. It caught the janitor and swept him off his feet, and somehow it was a _lot_ longer than the size of the cabinet implied, for it carried him almost all the way across the office! He uttered a frightened moan all the way until it reached its full, enormously extended length, and then it recoiled and slid all the all way back into the cabinet, with him still riding on it.

And then it recoiled again and shot him across the office and back again. By this time, he'd stopped moaning in fear, and in fact, for his third trip back and forth, he uttered an excited and extended, "Wheeeeeeeee!'

And now Rupert was totally cracking up with laughter. Even Ima couldn't control the giggles anymore.

They were interrupted when Tudball reentered the office with a piece of paper. "Mr. Gumby, I have a-the distribution list a-fer you." Rupert and Ima composed themselves just enough to pay attention: "The clothes were a-shipped out to five a-separate places. Two trucks a-took some of them to Brooklyn and Atlantic City. The rest are being a-shipped a-by plane to Houston, Texas, Saint a-Louis, Missouri, and to Athens, a-Greece." He handed Rupert the paper. "Here's a-the details."

Tudball suddenly inhaled sharply and sneezed, flipping his wig over his face again! It instantly nullified whatever dismay Rupert and Ima had about his news, and they started laughing again.

When Tudball recovered, he noted sarcastically, "I see the janitor's a-been busy."

He, Rupert, and Ima looked at the janitor, who had managed to close the top drawer while they were distracted, and pop open the second drawer from the bottom instead. He was now riding that drawer back and forth across the room like a bronco buster, wheezing, "Yippie-yi-yaaaaaaaay!"

A fourth person stepped into the office, a middle-aged cleaning woman in a shabby dress and shawl, with a dirty mop in her hand, a rumpled kerchief jammed over her head, and a face that bore a striking resemblance to Mrs. Wiggins - maybe her sister? "He's at it again, is he?" she noted sarcastically as she saw what the janitor was getting up to.

"Time a-te up his a-medication again," Tudball replied.

"I can see you're busy, so we'll be on our way," Rupert said hastily. "Thanks for the information."

As he and Ima eased past Tudball and the cleaning woman toward the door, the cleaning woman suddenly tugged her earlobe. She answered Rupert and Ima's confusion by saying, "Watch where you step, I lost my earring again. I gotta stop wearing clip-ons."

As they stepped out of the center, Rupert and Ima paused and looked at each other.

"Did those people seem . . . familiar?" asked Ima.

They both thought about it for a few seconds before finally muttering in unison, "Nah." It wasn't a dismissal of something as being unlikely, so much as a hopeful denial of something as being too crazy to be true.

They rejoined everyone at the cars, where Rupert filled everyone in on the situation and outlined his plan of action. "All right, let's look this situation over carefully."

Ab looked around. "Well, there are three big trucks in this lot, and one more is just driving up. The loading area is in front of the building, and there are a whole bunch of containers of donated stuff there. Clothes, canned food, toilet paper - Say, have you ever noticed that TV commercials and the labels on the packages never ever say toilet paper. They always call it bathroom tissue. I always thought that was the silliest thing in the world."

"Right now, I think _you're_ the silliest thing in the whole galaxy!" Homer retorted.

"Negative," replied Chip. "Averaging across all compiled lists of beings, locations, and items based upon such an emotional and subjective characteristic as 'silliness', most beings are of the opinion that the distinction of 'silliest' belongs to the quasi-intelligent fungus-simians who reside on the planet Lintball."

"There is a planet called 'Lintball'?" asked Phil.

"Is that in the same area as the planet Hairball?" asked Feathers.

"There is no planet officially designated 'Hairball' anywhere in known space, however there is a second habitable planet in the same system, designated Splat -"

"Never mind, Chip!" exclaimed Myran. To Rupert, he added, "My communicorders' battery and circuitry emissions are damped to avoid unauthorized detection. Neither Chip nor my spare communicorder can detect the missing one unless it's within two Earth-kilometers distance!"

"That's why we'll have to go after it!" declared Rupert. "There're five places it might be going. The only way we'll get that communicorder back is to split up and go to each of those places and search every possible charity shop or wherever!"

"Far be it from me to deny the urgency of the situation," said Phil. "I know full well what the consequences can be of allowing others to gain knowledge beyond their wisdom to use properly. But it's getting late, and even those most in tune with their selves need food and rest."

"Rest? I haven't even hit my second wind yet!" proclaimed Jerry. "But I'll admit, I _am_ gettin' hungry."

"Captain Karma has a point," said Homer. "We're all tired and hungry -" He glanced at Jerry. "Or just hungry, and your sweatpants are gonna be locked up tight inside a truck or a plane until at least tomorrow morning."

Rupert, Ima, and Myran clearly wanted to argue the point, their anxiousness to immediately retrieve the precious communicorder wrestling with the needs of their compatriots and the fact that Homer, of all people, had given surprisingly logical evidence that they had more time to work with.

"All right!" Rupert reluctantly snapped. "We'll head home, get supper and sleep, and meet back at the studio at seven o'clock tomorrow. Don't be late, and pack enough to be gone for a few days!"

Rupert's party (one of those kinds that doesn't know when to stop) reconvened at the Gumby house first thing the next morning. There was barely enough space in Rupert's living room for him and his co-workers and all the luggage everyone brought.

"I said pack enough for a _few days_!" he shouted to everyone. "This is not a two-week vacation! This is a serious mission!"

"Serious? Us?" Feathers muttered. "That'll be the day."

"Shut up!" Rupert replied.

"Rupert!" Phil insisted. "Be calm. Find your center. Find your inner peace."

"How can anyone find _anything_ in this mess?" retorted Ima.

"The only thing we have time to find is my communicorder!" insisted Myran.

"Myran's right!" Rupert replied. "We talked it over before the rest of you got here, and while Brooklyn and Atlantic City are both within driving distance, the best way to get to the other three cities is by transmat."

"And fortunately," added Myran, "I can use my spare communicorder to operate the transmat by remote control to bring us all back afterwards."

Rupert continued: "Who's got international calling plans on their cell phones?"

Ima, Phil, Homer, and Joe raised their hands.

"And who's kept up the payments on their international calling plans?"

Joe, and Homer lowered their hands. Rhoda raised hers. "Wait, so you have an international calling plan too?" asked Rupert. "Why didn't you raise your hand before?"

"You asked if I had one on my _cell phone_," she replied. "I have mine on my can opener."

"How can you use a can opener to make phone calls!?" demanded Fred.

"Who said anything about phone calls? I use an international plan to open imported foods! You know, Chow Mein? Vienna sausages? French fried onions?"

"You mean, all this time I've been _smuggling_ when I eat Chow Mein!?" cried Ab, horrified. "How could I have been so dumb!?"

" . . . I'm not gonna say it," muttered Feathers. "It's too easy."

"_AN_-yway!" interrupted Rupert. "Phil, you take Ab and Feathers in your car and drive to Brooklyn. Jerry, you, Rhoda, and Chip head for Atlantic City. Myran, you transmat yourself, Homer, and Joe to St. Louis, Ima and Gary to Athens, and Fred, Digger, and me to Houston."

"You're sending me to Greece!?" Ima exclaimed.

"Oh boy!" cried Gary. "Sunny skies, warm Mediterranean seas, and romantic Grecian nights! Can I bring my wife!?"

"Don't let yourselves get too excited," Rupert replied firmly. "Like I said, this isn't a vacation!"

"_I'm_ not excited," shouted Ima. "I'm furious!"

Everyone else did a double-take. "Come again!?" asked Gary.

"Romantic Grecian nights, my foot! Greece, Italy, Spain, France, those Mediterranean countries are all the same! Their idea of romance is big, sweaty, sex-crazed men flaunting their machismo on every street corner and lusting after every female between puberty and menopause! No young, attractive, sexy woman is safe anywhere in those places!"

"Then you don't have anything to worry about," said Joe.

DUE TO EXTREMELY VIOLENT CONTENT, THE NEXT THIRTY SECONDS OF THIS SCENE HAVE BEEN CENSORED.

"People, _please_!" pleaded Phil. "All of this negative energy will poison your souls forever if it is allowed to overwhelm the positive! You _must_ learn to contain your inner demons!"

"I couldn't agree more!" moaned the voice of Joe, from wherever his mouth was in the mashed-up pile of flesh that Ima turned him into.

"Enough already!" shouted Rupert. "Everyone who's driving, grab your stuff and get going! The rest of us, down to the basement to beam out! Somebody scoop up Joe and bring him along!"

Phil, Jerry, Ab, Rhoda, Chip, and Feathers had already left by the time everyone else had carried all their baggage down to the basement and stood before Myran's transmat, a three-by-four-meter stage with an equal-size scanning canopy built into the ceiling directly over it. Myran stood before the control console just off to one side while Ima and Gary finished loading onto the transmat stage a pile of luggage that would give Mr. T a hernia.

"We're all set to go!" Gary exclaimed. "How long does it take to transport us?"

"That depends on how long it takes for the transmat to scan the subatomic structure of all your luggage," Myran answered, sarcasm infusing his reply.

Homer looked at Gary's excessive possessions. "This could take weeks."

Ima and Gary took their places on the transmat stage. Homer was about to say something else, but Rupert cut him off with, "I'll clobber the first one who says, 'Beam me up Scotty, there's no intelligent life on this planet!'"

"Are you ready?" Myran asked.

"Energize," Ima said.

Myran manipulated the controls, and Ima, Gary, and their effects were surrounded by glowing energy beams which scanned them and then converted their mass to energy stored on waves of hyper-radiation which nothing known to Earth technology could possibly detect. The energy was then sent on its way to Athens, Greece.

Rupert picked up Digger and turned to Fred. "Our turn."

Rupert carefully placed Digger into the front basket of a ten-speed bicycle with a lot more accessories than average, while Fred loaded his and Rupert's backpacks in the two baskets straddling the rear wheel. They then wheeled the severely tricked-out bike up onto the stage.

"Coordinates are set," announced Myran. "Stand by."

He activated the controls, and Rupert, Fred, Digger, and their backpacks and bicycle disappeared in a blaze of energy.

"Okay, everyone else has beamed out," muttered Homer. "Can we go now?"

"Just be patient," answered Myran. "The coordinates have to be very precise. You don't want to end up in Rio de Janeiro, do you?"

"What's wrong with Rio?" asked Homer.

"Do you know how hot it gets in Rio this time of year? You know I hate hot weather," answered Myran. "Okay, it's ready. Everyone on the platform."

Homer helped Joe's slowly healing body stagger into the transmat. Myran paused only to pick up his spare communicorder and to set the timer on the console. He then joined Homer and Joe on the platform and waited. Five seconds later, the transmat hummed to life and the three travelers were surrounded by yet another blaze of energy.

Just before they disappeared, Joe mumbled, "Is there a bathroom on this flight?"

"I told you to go before we left!" Homer retorted.

"I couldn't pull myself up onto the toilet!"

**The characters of Mrs. Wiggins, Mr. Tudball, the World's Oldest Man, and the Cleaning Lady are copyright to The Carol Burnett Show, with thanks to Carol Burnett and Tim Conway for bringing them to life. Fred Flintstone's name is copyright Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers. All other characters are copyright to me.**


	5. Athens Espionage

**Chapter 4  
>Athens Espionage, or<br>Grecian Hair-Raiser Formula**

Athens, Greece. Today, it is the capital of a relatively small country in southeastern Europe, but 2,500 years ago it was the political and cultural center of a great civilization. It was here that the concept of democracy was born to the world, a concept which was passed down through the centuries and became the basis for the system of government of many nations today. In addition to its importance to ancient history, Athens was also the home to many of Greece's greatest writes, thinkers, and builders. Socrates and Plato are among the wisest and best-known citizens of ancient Athens. Their works still survive to this day, as do many of the city's finest architectural structures: the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the Temple of Hephaestus. Athens is one of the oldest cities in the Western world, and one of the most important in Western history. In many respects, Athens was the birthplace of Western civilization.

The preceding paragraph has been paid for by the Tourist Bureau of Greece, with offices in Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Edessa, and Cucamonga.

Jonathan Kerachi was busy working at his seafood store on Piraeus Street a few blocks from Omonoia Square. Despite the fact that it was late in the day, he knew a huge supply of lobster caught just off the coast of Crete would be arriving at the crack of dawn next morning, and he had to clear space for it. He had already finished putting all of his displays of fish and clams and other seafood delicacies into order. Just as he finished sweeping up the floor, he heard a strange noise coming from the back room, followed by multiple wet thuds and squishes. He rushed into his storeroom and was shocked to see a man, a woman, and a huge pile of suitcases floundering in a tank full of his best mackerel.

"When I get back to Poker Bluffs," Ima grumbled, "remind me to punch Myran's lights out."

It was then that they noticed the store-owner staring open-mouthed at them, both shocked at having two people appear from out of nowhere in his storeroom, and steaming mad at having two people sitting in his best mackerel. He started babbling angrily in a rapid string of foreign words which neither Ima nor Gary could understand in the least.

[Several days after the communicorder search was completed, the R.C. Gumby Productions staff succeeded in getting the storeowner's words translated. Full details of the quote cannot be given without assigning this novel a minimum rating of Mature, but part of the speech contained a reference to a form of ancient torture called "trusini." Further research revealed that in trusini, the victims are stripped naked and doused in goat spit, cow sweat, and olive oil. They are then plastered with two thousand barnacles, and have knives thrown at them by a blind soothsayer. If they survive this far, they are tied to the exposed sides of chariots, and the chariots are used for five days of races, demolition derbies, and crash safety tests. Then the victims' remains are gathered up and fed to a herd of sheep. After three more days, they are gathered up again and mixed with sand and glue, to be used as mortar for laying stones on heavily-traveled roads.]

Ima and Gary thought it best to leave immediately. Stopping only to gather up the luggage and pull fish out of their clothes, they were soon on their way walking down the street. Well, maybe _staggered_ down the street is more accurate, given that the incredible mass of luggage weighted them down so much, they could barely move.

"Maybe I could've gotten along without the water skis," groaned Gary.

"Maybe you could've thought to bring a luggage rack or something!" groaned Ima.

"Why didn't _you_!?"

"_I_ don't have one!"

"And you think _I_ do!?"

"You've got kids! Don't they have a wagon or something?"

"Who plays with wagons anymore!?"

Rounding a corner, they encountered a group of spectators watching a mime performance. Ima and Gary dropped their luggage so they could pause and watch. The sound of the avalanche interrupted the performance so bluntly, everyone turned to them, including the mime, and from the way the spectators looked, Ima and Gary had just destroyed U.S.-Greece relations for decades to come.

As it turned out, the performance only lasted a few more minutes after it resumed, after which the mime took a bow and the crowd dispersed. Once everyone else was gone, the mime approached Ima and Gary and spoke in a low whisper, "There was a young woman named Bright."

Gary thought for a moment and replied, "Whose speed was much faster than light."

"She set out one day in a relative way."

"And came back on the previous night."

The mime immediately shoved a small package into Gary's load of luggage and strolled off in an overly-casual manner.

"_That_ was weird!" exclaimed Ima.

"I'll say!" answered Gary. "I thought mimes never talked!"

"I mean, what's with the tag-team poem and the package!?"

"I just thought he needed help remembering that poem. I didn't know he was going to give me a present for it." He took a close look at the package, which was wrapped in a plain brown paper bag. "I wonder what's inside."

"In a plain brown wrapper? You really want to know?"

Gary thought for another moment and asked, "What's this story's rating again?"

"PG."

"In that case, I don't."

"Anyway," Ima added, "thanks to the time difference, it's already late afternoon. We need to find a hotel."

Gary looked at their mountain of baggage. "With about a dozen bellhops."

It took them about half an hour to pick up all their luggage and get moving again. Little did both of them know that they were being watched by two men from the window of an old rundown building across the street. Why they were showing such interest in the two Productions staff was unknown at this point - why _anybody_ would show such interest in two Productions staff is beyond me - but whatever their reasons were, they carefully emerged from the building and began following them.

What's even stranger is these two guys weren't the only ones. There was a third man hidden in the shadows of an alley between two other buildings on the other side of the street. When the first two guys were out of sight, he emerged from the alley and followed them as well. Or was he following Ima and Gary? At this stage, who knows?

_At this stage, who cares?_

Who asked you!?

Unaware of the attention being paid toward them, Ima and Gary lugged their load into the first hotel they found with a Vacancy sign out front. At least, they thought it was a Vacancy sign . . . None of them were in English, so they _hoped_ the sign said "Vacancy" and not something like "No Solicitors", or "Out to Lunch", or "Trespassers Will Be Torn Limb from Limb".

"Why would they tear trespassers limb from limb?" asked Gary as they entered the hotel lobby.

"Different country, different penal code," replied Ima.

Gary started choking back giggles. "What!?" demanded Ima.

"You said, 'penal' code!"

"Grow up!"

Gary indignantly dropped his luggage on the floor with a loud crash and shot back, "You're telling _me_ to grow up!? After the way you reacted five minutes ago!?"

"I am _not_ sharing a room with you! You're a married man and I'm a single woman!"

"And we're _both_ mature enough to respect each other's privacy and to not act like rabbits in heat the minute we're in the same room and the lights go out! Besides, we don't know how long we're gonna be here, and we don't have much money between us! One room with two separate beds costs a lot less than two separate rooms!"

"Don't have much money!? I've seen how many credit cards you have in your wallet!"

"I also have three kids!"

Ima couldn't argue that point. Nevertheless, "You swear you won't try anything!?"

"Like you said, I'm a married man. A _faithfully_ married man, 'til death do us part! Besides, I remember what happened to the last guy who _did_ try something! Thanks to you, I can't even _look_ at a jackhammer anymore!"

The memory briefly turned Ima's mouth into an evil smirk, then it vanished and she nodded her head curtly at Gary. An understanding thus come to, they approached the front desk. The equipment on the desk wasn't exactly state-of-the-art: There was no computer in sight, the register was a big old-fashioned book, and there was a push-button bell that one was supposed to ring for service.

Ima slapped her hand on the bell to ring it, and to her and Gary's surprise, the desk clerk popped up from evidently having been crouched down behind the desk. With an excited look and a wide grin, he announced, "Empty Arms Hotel!"

Ima and Gary looked at each other. There was something familiar about this guy . . .

Ima pushed the thought aside for the moment and replied to the clerk, "We need a room. Two separate beds."

The enthusiastic clerk replied, "Certainly, Ma'am! What kind of room would you like? We have Third Class, Second Class, and Deluxe Suites."

Gary turned to Ima. "Limited funds, remember?"

"I remember!" she replied impatiently. To the clerk, "What does a Third Class room have?"

"Four walls and a door."

Ima and Gary needed a few seconds to take that in, and then Ima exclaimed, "That's _all_!? No furniture, just four walls and a door!?"

"I hope a Second Class room has more than that!" added Gary.

"Yup! In Second Class, you get a light bulb."

"Is this Empty Arms Hotel or Empty _Rooms_ Hotel!?" retorted Ima.

Gary tamped down his fear of going broke and asked, "Okay, what's a Deluxe Suite like?

"Oh, fully furnished, Sir! Two beds, a bath, kitchenette, walk-in closet, and everything!"

"That doesn't make any sense!" exclaimed Ima. "How come your Second and Third Class rooms don't have any furniture at all!?"

"We ran outta coal for the furnace."

Ima turned to Gary. "Maybe your tents and sleeping bags were a good idea after all."

The clerk hurried around the desk. "Now, don't be so hasty, folks! Maybe not all our rooms are four stars, but we make up for it in innovation!"

As the clerk slowly moved across the room, directing Ima and Gary to the lobby's features, Gary asked, "What kind of innovations?"

"Efficiency, Sir! Efficiency! How can we keep our prices so low in this tough economy? By economizing in more ways than any other hotel ever dreamed of! All of our amenities are multi-purpose - each one serves at least two separate needs, thus cutting our costs by at least half AND providing unique experiences in guest comfort!"

"Like, what two needs for instance?" asked Ima.

"For example, we combined our sauna bath with the chef's pantry."

From out of nowhere, several loud voices shouted, "WHAT'D YA GET!?"

"Steamed vegetables with every meal!"

As the clerk started laughing out loud - as did the voices from nowhere - a long, vertical wall slat actually swung up from the wall and spanked him on his rear end!

As the clerk went back to his desk, Ima and Gary quickly turned on their heels and speed-walked out of the hotel, careful to avoid any more interaction with the clerk and any part of the wall.

After a few more tries, Ima and Gary finally found a hotel with a vacancy and furniture in most of the rooms. Their survey of the room they signed in for was interrupted by a gigantic crash as the bellhop, who had been doubled over and practically crushed under the weight of their baggage all the way from the lobby, finally collapsed and was buried under the mountain of bags.

"Is this a good place?" moaned the bellhop, his voice muffled under the luggage.

"That's fine, thanks," Ima replied.

The bellhop dug his way out of the luggage avalanche, struggled to his feet, and held out his hand. Gary shook it, saying, "Thanks, Pal."

The bellhop kept his hand out even as Gary let go of it. Ima said softly into Gary's ear, "I think he wants a tip."

"Oh, right!" Gary turned back to the bellhop and said, "Don't try to carry so much in one trip."

The bellhop gave up and left, wondering if he could at least ask for hazard pay after this job.

Gary turned back to Ima. "How long do you think before the communicorder arrives in Athens?"

"According to Rupert's list, the clothes shipment left on an overnight flight and it's due to land right about now. Figure another few hours to unload the plane and send the clothes to the shop on the list. Of course, it's already getting dark so the shops'll close soon, so it looks like we have another night to wait."

"In that case, I wanna see what's in that package. PG rating or otherwise."

Gary retrieved the mysterious package from the luggage, sat down on one of the beds, and unwrapped it. Inside the box was a bunch of electronic components and a computer flash drive. "What's all this?" asked Ima.

"It's a bunch of electronic components and a computer flash drive," Gary answered.

"I heard him the first time! I mean, why did that mime give them to you?" Ima paused for thought, and then added, "I think we should call Myran and have him beam us back with these things. He or Chip'll probably be able to figure out what they're for."

Ima pulled out her cell phone and dialed a special number that would link directly with Myran's spare communicorder. After just one ring, a smug automated voice answered: _"We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Your international calling plan has expired -"_

"WHAT!?" shouted Ima. She immediately hung up and dialed another number.

"Who're you calling?" asked Gary.

"The cell phone company! I made a payment on my calling plan just last week, and I'm not letting them cheat me out of it!" She put the phone to her ear and waited for an answer.

_"If you're calling about your local calling plan, press One. . . . If you're calling about your long-distance plan, press Two. . . . If you're calling about your international plan, press Three. . . "_

Ima impatiently thumbed Three.

_"If you'd like to make a payment, press One. . ."_

"I already made a payment!"

_"If you'd like to change your current calling plan, press Two. . . . If you're reporting a problem, press Three. . ."_

"Damn right, I'm reporting a problem!" she snapped under her breath as she thumbed the Three again.

_"If you're experiencing a problem accessing Call Waiting, press One. . ."_

Ima was rapidly losing what little patience she had left.

_"If you're calling to report an outage in your area, press Two. . ."_

"HOW THE HELL CAN I CALL TO REPORT THAT I CAN'T CALL ANYONE!?"

_"If you're experiencing a problem with your current calling plan, press Three. . ."_

Ima's finger stabbed the Three on her phone.

_"If you are unable to access the total number of minutes allotted to the current month of your calling plan, press One. . ."_

"AAAAAAAAAGGHHHH!"

Ima's thumb almost pile-drove right through the OFF button on her phone. "WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON THE SLIMY, SWINDLING PILES OF HUMAN GARBAGE WHO RUN THIS BLEEP-ING PHONE COMPANY, I'M GONNA - . . . What the hell just happened!?"

"Like we said, this is a PG story!"

"I don't give a BLEEP! what this damn story's rating is! My cell phone company's robbing me blind, and then they stick me with this automated brush-off system that goes on and on and on like a broken record, hoping I'll eventually give up trying to call them and yell at them to give me what I paid for!

"Never mind calling your phone company!" shouted Gary. "We can't contact Myran to have him beam us back to the studio! We're marooned in a foreign country with no transportation, and I didn't even get a chance to get my money exchanged!"

Ima's rage abruptly subsided enough to register confusion at that last part of Gary's outcry. "Why do you need to exchange money when you got all those credit cards!?"

Gary's expression turned sheepish, and after a brief hesitation he reluctantly confessed, "All but one are toys. I just keep them to make me look more important."

The implications made the rest of Ima's rage subside, to be replaced with apprehension. "So, just how limited are our funds then?"

"Is it dinner time?"

"Probably."

"How do you feel about splitting a cheese sandwich?"

"How do you feel about a knuckle sandwich!?"

After a moment of decision, Gary replied, "Nah, I don't feel like finger food tonight."

Before Ima could slap him silly for that . . make that slap him silli_er_ . . Gary pulled out his wallet and started counting what little American money he had with him. At the same time, the two mysterious strangers from earlier - that's the _first_ two who were together, not the third stranger, in case you're trying to keep track - carefully peeked into the room through the open window. Their four beady, sinister little eyes, one of which was covered with a monocle, stared at Ima and Gary. Slowly, the two men each held up a pistol, one aiming at Gary, the other at Ima.

"Ready," whispered the monocle owner. "Aim. . . Fire!"

At the same instant he hissed, "Fire!" Gary fumbled his wallet onto the floor. He and Ima simultaneously bent down to grab it, and their foreheads collided with a loud "Konk!" at the same instant two tiny darts shot out of both pistols, whizzed a few scant inches over their heads, and embedded themselves into the far wall.

Immediately upon impact, the darts injected their liquid contents into the wall and then quickly dissolved into nothingness.

The two would-be marksmen ducked out of sight as Ima and Gary stood up, rubbing their aching foreheads. Ima exclaimed to Gary, "Why don't you watch what you're doing!"

To her surprise, Gary swatted the air above him. "Why don't those _mosquitoes_ watch what they're doing?"

"What mosquitoes?"

"One just buzzed over my head. Didn't you hear it?"

"No, I was too busy getting a concussion!"

"You can get some ice at the restaurant. I saw one just down the street from here." His wallet back in his pocket, Gary started to turn toward the door, but then changed his mind and turned toward the bed. "Better not leave that package here." He grabbed the mystery package, and he and Ima left the room just as their two shadows peeked through the window again, pistols at the ready again but this time with no targets.

The two men crouched down below the window again. The one with the monocle had frustration written all over his face, and shook his fist in a fit of pique. "They've gone!" he snapped in a Germanic accent. "We missed our chance!"

The other man was older and pudgier than the first, and had a full head of gray-white hair and a matching bristle mustache. "A pity these guns take so long to reload."

"I know! Why did they insist on us using poison darts and these clumsy guns against those spies when a regular gun with a silencer works just as well? emBetter/em, even! We could've shot them several times in one go, and have the package by now!"

His partner replied with a shrug, "But you have to admit, these disintegrating darts leave a lot less evidence behind than bullets, Herr Colonel."

"_Schultz!_" hissed the colonel suddenly. "How many times do I have to tell you, while we're on assignment, _only_ call me Klink! Even though I outrank you -" Klink leaned close to Schultz and emphasized, "by a _lot_! - our identities must be kept top secret!"

Schultz proudly replied, "You have _nuh_-thing to fear, Herr C- . . I mean, _Klink_! No one will ever learn who you or I really are from _me_. If anyone tries to force the truth from me, I know _nuh_-thing!"

Klink gave Schultz a withering, disbelieving look. "Really. Not even if they forced you."

"Lock me in the deepest dungeon - torture me - threaten me with death - I will _never_ tell!"

"What if they bribe you with chocolate?"

Schultz's resolve crumbled. ". . . Eh . . . how much chocolate?"

Klink shook his fist in another fit of pique and retorted, "Come o-o-on! They're getting away with the package!" He and Schultz got up and hurried around the hotel to try and catch up with their quarry.

Quarry is the perfect word for two rock-heads like Ima and Gary.  
>"I HEARD THAT!" she roared.<p>

Ima and Gary found a charming little restaurant just two streets down from the hotel, and had two delicious meals. Their enjoyment disappeared when they found out the restaurant didn't accept American money. Seven hours, 417 washed dishes, and 39 broken dishes later, they finally dragged themselves half-conscious back to the hotel in the middle of the night. Ima collapsed onto her bed and fell asleep without even changing her clothes first. Gary had just enough strength left to detour to the bathroom and put band-aids on the three cuts he sustained while picking up broken glasses. Then he too collapsed onto the bed. Unfortunately, in his exhausted state, he collapsed onto Ima's bed by mistake. Gary realized his mistake one second later when his impact jolted Ima awake, she saw she wasn't alone in the bed anymore, and her fist propelled him all the way back into the bathroom. He spent the rest of the night sleeping upside-down in the shower.

Klink and Schultz followed them to the restaurant, but it wasn't one where you could seat yourself. They were able however to request a table near the entrance. That way, they could watch for when Ima and Gary left and immediately follow them again. After waiting for hours, not knowing their quarry was doing hard time in the kitchen, they assumed Ima and Gary got wise to them and sneaked out through the restroom window. They tried to follow, but portly Schultz got stuck in the window, and Klink spent the next two hours trying to pull him out. By the time he did, Ima and Gary's incarceration was over, and they managed to scare every customer who needed the men's room right out of the restaurant. The manager exploded like an atom bomb, and Klink and Schultz spent the rest of the night cleaning out the grease traps in the stoves and ovens, under penalty of trusini.

The next morning, Ima and Gary made several telephone calls and found out which second-hand clothing store the Good Will shipment from America was being sent to. They hailed a cab outside the hotel to take them there, and again Gary brought the package along for safekeeping. Klink and Schultz, having finally escaped from the restaurant, returned to the hotel just as Ima and Gary caught the cab. They planned to follow them to the store with freshly loaded tranquilizer guns and captured them and the mysterious package there, except that Klink tried to commandeer a private car on the pretense that he and Schultz were plain-clothes policemen trailing two suspected international smugglers. Not only did the car's owner not believe him, but he and his three passengers all turned out to be ex-wrestling champs on their way to an exhibition match, and they decided to have some sparring practice with Klink and Schultz before leaving. The two spies had to abandon their pursuit of Ima and Gary in favor of a quick trip to the hospital.

The third spy, whoever _he_ was, had been unable to follow any of them to the hotel yesterday. He had been forced to duck inside a store to avoid being seen, and got into a long argument with the store owner about trying to close up five minutes earlier than the hours posted on the window, just because business was slow that day. By the time the argument was over, the people he was tailing had disappeared, and it was five minutes _after_ the posted closing time, so he started _another_ argument with the store owner about making his assistant work unpaid overtime. After searching all night, he finally found the hotel just as Klink and Schultz were leaving in an ambulance, and was going to hail a cab to follow them, but he was delayed and the ambulance got away when he had to pay for a jaywalking ticket.  
>Ima and Gary arrived at the store. They were in luck that the owner spoke very good English, and they asked if they could look through the shipment.<p>

"Are you outta your minds!? You want to search through a pile of donated clothes for a notepad!?"

"It's very important!" Gary exclaimed. "It . . . uh, contains our boss' programming notes!"

"What kind of an idiot would come all the way across the Atlantic to look for a lost notepad?" the owner demanded.

Ima pointed at Gary. "He would."

"What!?" Gary exclaimed.

"You expect _me_ to be the idiot!?" Ima demanded.

"I think you both are!" the owner retorted. But she reluctantly agreed, just because she had too much work to argue about it anymore, and Ima and Gary dived into the numerous piles of clothes in the storeroom and sifted madly through them. Hours later, they were forced to give up, having found no trace of the communicorder anywhere. They did, however, find 49 gum wrappers, 21 used tissues, nine rubber bands, eight marbles, four feet one inches of string, two dead flies, and a half-eaten chocolate bar with a tapeworm living inside it. "I guess the communicorder was never sent here," Ima sighed.

"What was that?" the owner asked, having returned to the storeroom without their noticing.

"Uh, we were just saying it looks like the thing we lost was never sent here."

"Either that, or it's in the collection of clothes we just sent to the mountains."

"What!?" Ima and Gary both shouted in unison.

"Why didn't you tell us some of these clothes had already been shipped out!?" cried Gary.

"You didn't ask. They were shipped to a small town called Doesn't-Matterhorn."

"Doesn't-Matterhorn?" Ima repeated.

"It's in the mountains. Not many people know about it, and those who do don't give a damn that it is."

Ima groaned loudly, and she and Gary left. It was well into the afternoon by then, but as luck would have it, they spotted a car rental place. "We'll have to rent a car if we're going to this town," said Gary. "A _cheap_ car."

As it turned out, even with their limited funds, they were able to afford the best and newest car the rental place had to offer: a sturdy, reliable 1984 Plymouth with only 479,812.7 miles on it. Ima and Gary got in and started it up. Three false starts and six backfires later, they were on their way. Unknown to them, not far behind them were Klink and Schultz, fresh out of the hospital and in hot pursuit in a 1971 Harley Davidson. The third spy followed behind them on a second-hand Schwinn.

Two hours later, Ima and Gary were speeding and bumping along the dusty mountain road with a thousand-foot cliff on one side and a two-thousand-foot mountain side on the other. Ima skillfully kept the auto on the road through every hairpin turn while Gary covered his eyes and shook like a leaf in a hurricane.

"Y-y-you've been taking d-driving lessons f-from Jerry again, h-haven't you!?" he stammered.

"The ride wouldn't be so dicey if you weren't shaking so hard! You're throwing the car off-balance!"

"Y-y-you try b-being calm when you're between a r-r-rock a-and a hard d-d-drop!"

"Calm down! I know what I'm doing!"

Just then, Gary happened to glance through his fingers into the rear-view mirror. "You suppose th-those two guys in the m-m-motorcycle know what _they're_ doing!?"

Klink and Schultz, the two guys in the motorcycle, _thought_ they knew what they were doing. That is, Klink thought they were finally about to gain the upper hand against Ima and Gary, while Schultz thought he was going to faint.

"Please, Herr Klink!" he begged. "I cannot drive this fast on a road like this!"

"Schultz, don't you dare slow down now! I'm not going to lose that package again if it's the last thing I do!"

"It may _be_ the last thing you do!" Schultz yelped as he barely navigated through the latest sharp turn. "It's no good! I'll never keep up with them all the way to the next town!"

"You won't have to! I'm putting an end to this ridiculous chase right now!" Klink reached into his jacket and pulled out an old-style Luger. "Hold her steady! I'm going to shoot out their tire! Once they've stopped, we liquidate them, grab the package, and mission accomplished!"

Klink took careful aim - or _tried_ to. "I said _steady_, Schultz! _Steady!_"

"The cycle _is_ steady, it's the _road_ that won't hold still!"

Gary peeked through his fingers at the rear-view mirror again. "Ima, i-is it m-my imagination, or is that g-g-guy in the cycle p-p-pointing a gun at us!?"

"A gun!? That's ridiculous, nobody's want to shoot _us_!"

By some miracle, the first shot Klink got off was a direct hit on one of the car's rear tires. It exploded into shredded rubber, causing Ima to immediately lose control and skid toward the cliff edge.

"Then again," she said with fake calm, "I could be wrong."

"MOOOOOOOMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEE!" Gary screamed as the car skidded over the cliff and fell off into space.

Now this is what I call a cliff-hanger! HAHAHAHAHA-(POW!)

"Hunh," muttered Schultz, "jolly joker..."

**The clerk at the Empty Arms Hotel (and what happened to his behind) is copyright to Gaylord Productions, with thanks to Roy Clark for bringing him to life. Klink and Schultz are copyright to Bing Crosby Productions, with thanks to Werner Klemperer and John Banner for bringing them to life. Ima, Gary, and almost all the other incidental characters in this chapter are copyright to me, and so far haven't been brought to life by anybody I know. Except for the third, as-yet unnamed spy, and that would be telling...**


End file.
